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'Al-Qaeda 7' smear campaign is an assault on American
values
By Eugene Robinson (Washington Post)
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
The word "McCarthyism" is overused, but in this case it's mild. Liz
Cheney,
the former vice president's ambitious daughter, has in her hand a list of
Justice Department lawyers whose "values" she has the gall to
question. She
ought to spend the time examining her own principles, if she can find them.
A group that Liz Cheney co-chairs, called Keep America Safe, has spent the
past two weeks scurrilously attacking the Justice Department officials
because they "represented or advocated for terrorist detainees"
before
joining the administration. In other words, they did what lawyers are
supposed to do in this country: ensure that even the most unpopular
defendants have adequate legal representation and that the government obeys
the law.
Liz Cheney is not ignorant, and neither are the other co-chairs of her
group, advocate Debra Burlingame and pundit William Kristol, who writes a
monthly column for The Post. Presumably they know that "the American
tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients is at least as old
as John Adams' representation of the British soldiers charged in the Boston
Massacre" -- in other words, older than the nation itself.
That quote is from a letter by a group of conservative lawyers -- including
several former high-ranking officials of the Bush-Cheney administration,
legal scholars who have supported draconian detention and interrogation
policies, and even Kenneth W. Starr -- that blasts the "shameful series
of
attacks" in which Liz Cheney has been the principal mouthpiece. Among
the
signers are Larry Thompson, who was deputy attorney general under John
Ashcroft; Peter Keisler, who was acting attorney general for a time during
George W. Bush's second term; and Bradford Berenson, who was an associate
White House counsel during Bush's first term.
"To suggest that the Justice Department should not employ talented
lawyers
who have advocated on behalf of detainees maligns the patriotism of people
who have taken honorable positions on contested questions," the letter
states.
But maligning is apparently the whole point of the exercise. The smear
campaign by Cheney, et al., has nothing to do with keeping America
safe. It
can only be an attempt to inflict political damage on the Obama
administration by portraying the Justice Department as somehow
"soft" on
terrorism. Even by Washington's
low standards, this is unbelievably
dishonest and dishonorable.
"Whose values do they share?" a video on the group's Web site
ominously
asks. The answer is obvious: the values enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
The most prominent of the nine Justice officials, Principal Deputy Solicitor
General Neal Katyal, represented Osama bin Laden's driver, Salim Hamdan, in
a case that went to the Supreme Court. In a 5-to-3 decision, the court sided
with Hamdan and ruled that the Bush administration's military tribunals were
unconstitutional. Are Liz Cheney and her pals angry that Katyal was right?
Or do they also question the "values" and patriotism of the five
justices
who voted with the majority?
The letter from the conservative lawyers points out that "in terrorism
detentions and trials alike, defense lawyers are playing, and will continue
to play, a key role." It notes that whether terrorism suspects are tried
in
civilian or military courts, they will have access to counsel -- and that
Guantanamo inmates, even if they do
not face formal charges, have a right to
habeas corpus review of their detention. It is the federal courts -- not
defense lawyers -- that have made all of this crystal clear. If Cheney and
her group object, they should prepare a blanket denunciation of the federal
judiciary. Or maybe what they really don't like is that pesky old
Constitution, with all its checks, balances and guarantees of due process.
How inconvenient to live in a country that respects the rule of law.
But there I go again, taking the whole thing seriously. This is really part
of a death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy to wound President Obama politically.
The charge of softness on terrorism -- or terrorist suspects -- is absurd;
Obama has brought far more resources and focus to the war against al-Qaeda
in Afghanistan
than the Bush-Cheney administration cared to summon. Since
Obama's opponents can't attack him on substance, they resort to
atmospherics. They distort. They insinuate. They sully. They blow smoke.
This time, obviously, they went too far. But the next Big Lie is probably
already in the works. Scorched-earth groups like Keep America Safe may just
be pretending not to understand our most firmly established and cherished
legal principles, but there is one thing they genuinely don't grasp: the
concept of shame.
March 7, 2010
The Up-or-Down Vote on Obama's Presidency
By FRANK RICH (NY Times)
WEDNESDAY'S health care rally was one of President Obama's finest hours. It
was so fine it couldn't be blighted even by his preposterous backdrop, a
cohort of white-jacketed medical workers large enough to staff a hospital in
one of the daytime soaps that refused to be pre-empted by the White House
show.
Obama's urgent script didn't need such cheesy theatrics. At last he took
ownership of what he called "my proposal," stating concisely three
concrete
ways the bill would improve America's
broken health care system. At last he
pushed for a majority-rule, up-or-down vote in Congress. At last he conceded
that bipartisan agreement between two parties with "honest and substantial
differences" on fundamental principles wasn't happening. At last he
mobilized his rhetoric against a villain everyone could hiss - insurance
companies. In a brief address, he mentioned these malefactors of great greed
13 times.
There was only one problem. This finest hour arrived hastily and tardily. At
1:45 p.m. Eastern time, who was
watching? Of those who did watch or caught
up later, how many bought the president's vow to finish the job "in the
next
few weeks"? We've heard this too many times before. Last May Obama said
he
would have a bill by late July. In July he said he wanted it "done by
the
fall." The White House's new date for final House action - specified as
March 18 by Robert Gibbs, the press secretary - is already in jeopardy.
"They are waiting for us to act," Obama said on Wednesday of the
American
people. "They are waiting for us to lead." Actually, they have
given up
waiting. Some 80 percent of the country believes that "nothing can be
accomplished" in Washington,
according to an Ipsos/McClatchy poll conducted
a week ago. The percentage is just as high among Democrats, many of whom
admire the president but have a sinking sense of disillusionment about his
ability to exercise power.
Now that we have finally arrived at the do-or-die moment for Obama's
signature issue, we face the alarming prospect that his presidency could be
toast if he doesn't make good on a year's worth of false starts. And it won't
even be the opposition's fault. If too many Democrats in the House defect,
health care will be dead. The G.O.P. would be able to argue this fall, not
without reason, that the party holding the White House and both houses of
Congress cannot govern.
For the sake of argument, let's say that Obama does eke out his victory.
Republicans claim that if he does so by "ramming through" the bill
with the
Congressional reconciliation process, they will have another winning issue
for November. On this, they are wrong. Their problem is not just their own
hypocritical record on reconciliation, which they embraced gladly to ram
through the budget-busting Bush tax cuts. They'd also have to contend with
this country's congenitally short attention span. Once the health care fight
is over and out of sight, it will be out of mind to most Americans. We've
already forgotten about Afghanistan
- until the next bloodbath.
The 2010 election will instead be fought about the economy, as most
elections are, especially in a recession whose fallout remains severe. But
that battle may be even tougher for this president and his party - and not
just because of the unemployment numbers. The leadership shortfall we've
witnessed during Obama's yearlong health care march - typified by the missed
deadlines, the foggy identification of his priorities, the sometimes abrupt
shifts in political tone and strategy - won't go away once the bill does.
This weakness will remain unless and until the president himself corrects
it.
Those who are unsympathetic or outright hostile to Obama frame his failures
as an attempt to impose "socialism" on a conservative nation. The
truth is
that the Fox News right would believe this about any Democratic president no
matter who he was and what his policies were. Obama, who has expanded the
war in Afghanistan
and proved reluctant to reverse extra-constitutional
Bush-Cheney jurisprudence, is a radical mainly to those who believe a
conservative Republican senator like Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas
is a
closet commie.
The more serious debate about Obama is being conducted by neutral or
sympathetic observers. There are many hypotheses. In Newsweek, Jon Meacham
has written about an "inspiration gap." He sees the professorial
president
as "sometimes seeming to be running the Brookings Institution, not the
country." In The New Yorker, Ken Auletta has raised the perils of
Obama's
overexposure in our fractionalized media. (As if to prove the point, the
president was scheduled to appear on Fox's "America's
Most Wanted" to
celebrate its 1,000th episode this weekend.) In the Beltway, the hottest
conversations center on the competence of Obama's team. Washington Post
columnists are now dueling over whether Rahm Emanuel is an underutilized
genius whose political savvy the president has foolishly ignored - or a bull
in the capital china shop who should be replaced before he brings Obama
down.
But the buck stops with the president, not his chief of staff. And if there's
one note that runs through many of the theories as to why Obama has
disappointed in Year One, it cuts to the heart of what had been his major
strength: his ability to communicate a compelling narrative. In the
campaign, that narrative, of change and hope, was powerful - both about his
own youth, biography and talent, and about a country that had gone wildly
off track during the failed presidency of his predecessor. In governing,
Obama has yet to find a theme that is remotely as arresting to the majority
of Americans who still like him and are desperate for him to succeed.
The problem is not necessarily that Obama is trying to do too much, but that
there is no consistent, clear message to unite all that he is trying to do.
He has variously argued that health care reform is a moral imperative to
protect the uninsured, a long-term fiscal fix for the American economy and
an attempt to curb insurers' abuses. It may be all of these, but between the
multitude of motives and the blurriness (until now) of Obama's own specific
must-have provisions, the bill became a mash-up that baffled or defeated
those Americans on his side and was easily caricatured as a big-government
catastrophe by his adversaries.
Obama prides himself on not being ideological or partisan - of following, as
he put it in his first prime-time presidential press conference, a
"pragmatic agenda." But pragmatism is about process, not principle.
Pragmatism is hardly a rallying cry for a nation in this much distress, and
it's not a credible or attainable goal in a Washington
as dysfunctional as
the one Americans watch in real time on cable. Yes, the Bush administration
was incompetent, but we need more than a brilliant mediator, manager or
technocrat to move us beyond the wreckage it left behind. To galvanize the
nation, Obama needs to articulate a substantive belief system that's built
from his bedrock convictions. His presidency cannot be about the cool
equanimity and intellectual command of his management style.
That he hasn't done so can be attributed to his ingrained distrust of
appearing partisan or, worse, a knee-jerk "liberal." That is
admirable in
intellectual theory, but without a powerful vision to knit together his
vision of America's
future, he comes off as a doctrinaire Democrat anyway.
His domestic policies, whether on climate change or health care or
regulatory reform, are reduced to items on a standard liberal wish list. If
F.D.R. or Reagan could distill, coin and convey a credo
"nonideological"
enough to serve as an umbrella for all their goals and to attract lasting
majority coalitions of disparate American constituencies, so can this gifted
president.
He cannot wait much longer. The rise in credit-card rates, as well as the
drop in consumer confidence, home sales and bank lending, all foretell more
suffering ahead for those who don't work on Wall Street. But on these issues
the president, too timid to confront the financial industry backers of his
own campaign (or their tribunes in his own administration) and too fearful
of sounding like a vulgar partisan populist, has taken to repeating his
health care performance.
And so leadership on financial reform, as with health care, has been
delegated to bipartisan Congressional negotiators poised to neuter it. The
protracted debate that now seems imminent - over whether a consumer
protection agency will be in the Fed or outside it - is again about the
arcana of process and bureaucratic machinery, not substance. Since Obama
offers no overarching narrative of what financial reform might really mean
to Americans in their daily lives, Americans understandably assume the
reforms will be too compromised or marginal to alter a system that leaves
their incomes stagnant (at best) while bailed-out bankers return to partying
like it's 2007. Even an unimpeachable capitalist titan like Warren Buffett,
venting in his annual letter to investors last month, sounds more fired up
about unregulated derivatives and more outraged about unpunished
finance-industry executives than the president does.
This time Obama doesn't have a year to arrive at his finest hour. Not to put
too fine a point on it, but the clock runs out on Nov. 2.
How to ruin a child: Too much esteem, too little sleep
By George F. Will (Washington Post)
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Memo to that Massachusetts school
where children in physical education
classes jump rope without using ropes: Get some ropes. And you -- you are
about 85 percent of all parents -- who are constantly telling your children
how intelligent they are: Do your children a favor and pipe down.
These are nuggets from "NutureShock: New Thinking About Children"
by Po
Bronson and Ashley Merryman. It is another book to torment modern parents
who are determined to bring to bear on their offspring the accumulated
science of child-rearing. Modern parents want to nurture so skillfully that
Mother Nature will gasp in admiration at the marvels their parenting
produces from the soft clay of children.
Those Massachusetts children
are jumping rope without ropes because of a
self-esteem obsession. The assumption is that thinking highly of oneself is
a prerequisite for high achievement. That is why some children's soccer
teams stopped counting goals (think of the damaged psyches of children who
rarely scored) and shower trophies on everyone. No child at that
Massachusetts school suffers
damaged self-esteem by tripping on the jump
rope.
But the theory that praise, self-esteem and accomplishment increase in
tandem is false. Children incessantly praised for their intelligence (often
by parents who are really praising themselves) often underrate the
importance of effort. Children who open their lunchboxes and find mothers'
handwritten notes telling them how amazingly bright they are tend to falter
when they encounter academic difficulties. Also, Bronson and Merryman say
that overpraised children are prone to cheating because they have not
developed strategies for coping with failure.
"We put our children in high-pressure environments," Bronson and
Merryman
write, "seeking out the best schools we can find, then we use the
constant
praise to soften the intensity of those environments." But children
excessively praised for their intelligence become risk-adverse in order to
preserve their reputations. Instead, Bronson and Merryman say, praise effort
("I like how you keep trying"): It is a variable children can
control.
They often cannot control cars. In 1999, a Johns
Hopkins University
study
found that some school districts that abolished driver's education courses
experienced a 27 percent decrease in auto accidents among 16- and
17-year-olds. Odd.
Not really. Bronson and Merryman say driver's ed teaches the rules of the
road and mechanics of driving, but teenagers are in fatal crashes at twice
the rate of other drivers because of poor decisions, not poor skills. The
wiring in the frontal lobe of the teenage brain is not fully formed.
Driver's ed courses make getting a license easy, thereby increasing the
supply of young drivers who actually have holes in their heads.
Their unfinished heads should spend more time on pillows. Only 5 percent of
high school seniors get eight hours of sleep a night. Children get a hour
less than they did 30 years ago, which subtracts IQ points and adds body
weight.
Until age 21, the circuitry of a child's brain is being completed. Bronson
and Merryman report research on grade schoolers showing that "the
performance gap caused by an hour's difference in sleep was bigger than the
gap between a normal fourth-grader and a normal sixth-grader." In high
school, there is a steep decline in sleep hours, and a striking correlation
of sleep and grades.
Tired children have trouble retaining learning "because neurons lose
their
plasticity, becoming incapable of forming the new synaptic connections
necessary to encode a memory. . . . The more you learned during the day, the
more you need to sleep that night."
The school day starts too early because that is convenient for parents and
teachers. Awakened at dawn, teenage brains are still releasing melatonin,
which makes them sleepy. This is one reason young adults are responsible for
half of the 100,000 annual "fall asleep" automobile crashes. When Edina,
Minn., changed its high school start from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30
a.m.,
math/verbal SAT scores rose substantially.
Furthermore, sleep loss increases the hormone that stimulates hunger and
decreases the one that suppresses appetite. Hence the correlation between
less sleep and more obesity.
Bronson and Merryman slay a slew of myths. But perhaps the soundest advice
for parents is: Lighten up. People have been raising children for
approximately as long as there have been people. Only recently -- about five
minutes ago, relative to the long-running human comedy -- have parents been
driving themselves to distraction by taking too seriously the idea that
"as
the twig is bent the tree's inclined." Twigs are not limitlessly
bendable;
trees will be what they will be.
Wild pitches from Sen. Bunning
By Dana Milbank (Washington Post)
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
In his 17 years pitching in the big leagues, Jim Bunning was known for his
graceful curveball, his rising slider and his sidearm fastball. Now 78 years
old and about to retire from the Senate, the Republican of Kentucky is
apparently down to only one pitch: the screwball.
For four days, he has been on a one-man campaign to cut off unemployment
benefits, kick the unemployed off of health insurance, cut Medicare payments
to doctors, deny satellite TV to rural Americans, shut down federal flood
insurance and highway projects, and furlough thousands of federal workers.
Democrats can hardly believe the gift Bunning has given them by
single-handedly shutting down these popular programs. Bunning's fellow
Republicans are aghast. If this were baseball, the Hall of Famer would be on
his way down to triple-A. But this is the Senate, where any one of the 100
members has the ability to bring proceedings to a halt, and Bunning
continues to hurl his wild pitches.
The leadoff hitter Bunning faced on Monday was ABC News producer Z. Byron
Wolf. Wolf, intercepting Bunning as he left his office, asked the senator to
stay and talk to the cameras. Bunning, according to Wolf, flashed him the
middle finger.
Next batter: ABC's Jonathan Karl, who caught Bunning at the elevator, with
the camera rolling. "Excuse me! This is a senators-only elevator!"
Bunning
shouted.
On deck was Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, who asked for the 10th
time for the Senate to approve, by unanimous consent, a temporary measure
that would avoid the furloughs and the cutoff of unemployment benefits and
highway funds.
"I object!" Bunning called out from the rear of the chamber,
raising his
right hand.
Reid was almost gleeful. "The fact is my friends on the other side of
the
aisle are opposing extending unemployment benefits for people who are out of
work," he said.
The ornery Kentuckian said he was merely insisting that Congress find a way
to pay for the $10 billion, 30-day extension, but that was difficult to
square with his recent votes against attempts to rein in debt and spending.
This left people puzzling over Bunning's motives. Was he taking revenge on
his senior colleague from Kentucky,
Senate Republican leader Mitch
McConnell, who helped to push Bunning into retirement? Or was he just being,
well, crazy? This second possibility cannot be dismissed out of hand. With
the Phillies and the Tigers, he had enviable accuracy, boasting one of the
best strikeout-to-walk ratios. But since his reelection campaign, in 2004,
Bunning has had some serious control problems.
He said his opponent looked like one of Saddam Hussein's sons. He suggested
that he and his wife had been roughed up by "little green doctors"
at a
political picnic. He refused to debate in person, instead doing so by
teleconference from Republican National Committee offices in Washington,
where he used a teleprompter.
Just over a year ago, Bunning resumed his erratic form when he predicted in
public that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would probably be dead
from pancreatic cancer within nine months.
Yet, with the possible exception of that perfect game in '64, the events of
the past week have been Bunning's most visible.
Reid opened Monday's Senate session with the same business that had been on
the floor for Thursday's and Friday's sessions: trying to get Bunning to
release his objection. Bunning, his face red, stared angrily at Reid.
Bunning claimed the standoff was Reid's fault, for removing the provisions
from an earlier piece of legislation. Pointing at Reid, Bunning blurted out:
"He did it!"
True, there were many ways in which Democrats could have passed the
extension earlier. But then they would have missed the satisfaction of
fighting with Bunning. As Republicans went to the Senate floor to try to
change the subject, Democrats held a teleconference with reporters.
"This is
a part of the wake-up call to the American people that Republicans are
abusing procedures in the Senate and it is costing the American people,"
said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.),
head of the House Democrats' 2010
campaign.
On the Senate floor, Democrats lined up for the chance to denounce Bunning
for his "outrageous" affront to the unemployed. Two hours after
Reid forced
Bunning to make his 10th objection, the deputy Democratic leader, Dick
Durbin (Ill.) went after
Bunning for an 11th time. For 20 minutes, Durbin,
looking up at the visitors in the gallery, spoke of all the programs Bunning
had temporarily killed. "I don't get it," he said. "I feel we ought
to be
standing behind the people in our nation who are struggling to find a
job,"
he said.
Listening to Durbin, Bunning grinned, laughed and muttered to himself. At
one point he extended his right hand -- his pitching hand! -- to the floor,
shook his fingers and clenched them into a fist. But instead of slugging
Durbin, he merely raised an objection, his 11th, and promised to do it again
and again. "As many people that get up and propose that," he said,
"I will
be here, whenever it is."
That's right where the opposing team wants him.
March 2, 2010
Editorial (NY Times)
The Second Amendment's Reach
Two years ago, the Supreme Court struck down parts of the District
of
Columbia's gun-control law. On Tuesday, the court
will consider whether that
decision should apply everywhere in the country, not just in the federal
territory of the nation's capital.
We disagreed strongly with the 2008 decision, which took an expansive and
aggressive view of the right to bear arms. But there is an even broader
issue at stake in the new case: The Supreme Court's muddled history in
applying the Constitution to states and cities. It should make clear that
all of the protections of the Bill of Rights apply everywhere.
McDonald v. Chicago is a
challenge to a law that makes it extremely
difficult to own a handgun within Chicago's
city limits. The challengers
rely on the court's 5-to-4 ruling in 2008, which recognized an individual
right under the Second Amendment to carry guns for self-defense. But that
decision left open an important question. The Bill of Rights once was
largely thought to be a set of limitations on the federal government. Does
the right to bear arms apply against city and state governments as well?
Since states and localities do far more gun regulation than the federal
government, the court's answer will have a powerful impact. The United
States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago,
relying on
19th-century precedents, ruled that the Second Amendment does not apply to
states and cities.
Under the doctrine of "selective incorporation," the Supreme Court
has ruled
on a case-by-case basis that most, but so far not quite all, of the Bill of
Rights applies to states and cities. The court should dispense with the
selectivity and make clear that states and cities must respect the Bill of
Rights.
To justify incorporation, the court has relied on the 14th Amendment, which
was enacted after the Civil War to ensure equality for newly freed slaves.
The amendment has two relevant clauses: the due process clause that requires
government to act with proper respect for the law, and the privileges or
immunities clause, which is more focused on protecting substantive
individual rights.
The logical part of the amendment to base incorporation on is the privileges
or immunities clause, but a terrible 1873 Supreme Court ruling blocked that
path and the court has relied since then on the due process clause.
A group of respected constitutional scholars and advocates is asking the
court to switch to the privileges or immunities clause as the basis for
applying the Bill of Rights to states and cities. That would be truer to the
intent of the founders, and it could open the door to a more robust
constitutional jurisprudence that would be more protective of individual
rights.
It is unlikely that the court will delve directly into the gun issues. If it
decides to apply the Second Amendment to cities, it would probably send the
case back to a lower court to evaluate the Chicago
law. If that happens, the
justices should guide the court in a way that makes clear that reasonable
gun restrictions will still be upheld.
The Supreme Court's conservative majority has made clear that it is very
concerned about the right to bear arms. There is another right, however,
that should not get lost: the right of people, through their elected
representatives, to adopt carefully drawn laws that protect them against
other people's guns.
February 28, 2010
The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged
By FRANK RICH (NY Times)
No one knows what history will make of the present - least of all
journalists, who can at best write history's sloppy first draft. But if I
were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most
significant of February 2010, I wouldn't choose the kabuki health care
summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I'd
put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the
tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal
Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with
the dark afterlife of an omen.
What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself
than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass -
or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would
be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a
"Tea Party terrorist." But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing
anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under
the Tea Party banner. That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create
instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed
politicians, including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were
publicly empathizing with Stack's credo - rather than risk crossing the most
unforgiving brigade in their base.
Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, even rationalized Stack's
crime. "It's sad the incident in Texas
happened," he said, "but by the same
token, it's an agency that is unnecessary. And when the day comes when that
is over and we abolish the I.R.S., it's going to be a happy day for
America."
No one in King's caucus condemned these remarks. Then again, what
King euphemized as "the incident" took out just 1 of the 200
workers in the
Austin building: Vernon Hunter, a
68-year-old Vietnam
veteran nearing his
I.R.S. retirement. Had Stack the devastating weaponry and timing to match
the death toll of 168 inflicted by Timothy McVeigh on a federal building in
Oklahoma in 1995, maybe a few of the congressman's peers would have cried
foul.
It is not glib or inaccurate to invoke Oklahoma City
in this context,
because the acrid stench of 1995 is back in the air. Two days before Stack's
suicide mission, The Times published David Barstow's chilling, months-long
investigation of the Tea Party movement. Anyone who was cognizant during the
McVeigh firestorm would recognize the old warning signs re-emerging from the
mists of history. The Patriot movement. "The New World Order," with
its
shadowy conspiracies hatched by the Council on Foreign Relations and the
Trilateral Commission. Sandpoint, Idaho.
White supremacists. Militias.
Barstow confirmed what the Southern
Poverty Law Center had found in its
report last year: the unhinged and sometimes armed anti-government right
that was thought to have vaporized after its Oklahoma
apotheosis is making a
comeback. And now it is finding common cause with some elements of the
diverse, far-flung and still inchoate Tea Party movement. All it takes is a
few self-styled "patriots" to sow havoc.
Equally significant is Barstow's
finding that most Tea Party groups have no
affiliation with the G.O.P. despite the party's ham-handed efforts to co-opt
them. The more we learn about the Tea Partiers, the more we can see why.
They loathe John McCain and the free-spending, TARP-tainted presidency of
George W. Bush. They really do hate all of Washington,
and if they hate
Obama more than the Republican establishment, it's only by a hair or two.
(Were Obama not earning extra demerits in some circles for his race, it
might be a dead heat.) The Tea Partiers want to eliminate most government
agencies, starting with the Fed and the I.R.S., and end spending on
entitlement programs. They are not to be confused with the Party of No
holding forth in Washington - a party that, after all, is now positioning
itself as a defender of Medicare spending. What we are talking about here is
the Party of No Government at All.
The distinction between the Tea Party movement and the official G.O.P. is
real, and we ignore it at our peril. While Washington is fixated on the
natterings of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Michael Steele and the presumed
2012 Republican presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, these and the other
leaders of the Party of No are anathema or irrelevant to most Tea Partiers.
Indeed, McConnell, Romney and company may prove largely irrelevant to the
overall political dynamic taking hold in America
right now. The old G.O.P.
guard has no discernible national constituency beyond the scattered, often
impotent remnants of aging country club Republicanism. The passion on the
right has migrated almost entirely to the Tea Party's counterconservatism.
The leaders embraced by the new grass roots right are a different slate
entirely: Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. Simple math dictates that
none of this trio can be elected president. As George F. Will recently
pointed out, Palin will not even be the G.O.P. nominee "unless the party
wants to lose at least 44 states" (as it did in Barry Goldwater's 1964
Waterloo). But these leaders do
have a consistent ideology, and that
ideology plays to the lock-and-load nutcases out there, not just to the
peaceable (if riled up) populist conservatives also attracted to Tea
Partyism. This ideology is far more troubling than the boilerplate corporate
conservatism and knee-jerk obstructionism of the anti-Obama G.O.P.
Congressional minority.
In the days after Stack's Austin
attack, the gradually coalescing Tea Party
dogma had its Washington coming
out party at the annual Conservative
Political Action Conference (CPAC), across town from Capitol Hill. The most
rapturously received speaker was Beck, who likened the G.O.P. to an
alcoholic in need of a 12-step program to recover from its
"progressive-lite" collusion with federal government. Beck
vilified an
unnamed Republican whose favorite president was the progressive Theodore
Roosevelt - that would be McCain - and ominously labeled progressivism a
cancer that "must be cut out of the system."
A co-sponsor of CPAC was the John Birch Society, another far-right
organization that has re-emerged after years of hibernation. Its views,
which William F. Buckley Jr. decried in the 1960s as an "idiotic"
and
"irrational" threat to true conservatism, remain unchanged. At the
conference's conclusion, a presidential straw poll was won by Congressman
Paul, ending a three-year Romney winning streak. No less an establishment
conservative observer than the Wall Street Journal editorialist Dorothy
Rabinowitz describes Paul's followers as "conspiracy theorists,
anti-government zealots, 9/11 truthers, and assorted other cadres of the
obsessed and deranged."
William Kristol dismissed the straw poll results as the youthful folly of
Paul's jejune college fans. William Bennett gingerly pooh-poohed Beck's
anti-G.O.P. diatribe. But in truth, most of the CPAC speakers, including
presidential aspirants, were so eager to ingratiate themselves with this
claque that they endorsed the Beck-Paul vision rather than, say, defend
Bush, McCain or the party's Congressional leadership. (It surely didn't help
Romney's straw poll showing that he was the rare Bush defender.) And so -
just one day after Stack crashed his plane into the Austin I.R.S. office -
the heretofore milquetoast former Minnesota governor, Tim Pawlenty, told the
audience to emulate Tiger Woods's wife and "take a 9-iron and smash the
window out of big government in this country."
Such violent imagery and invective, once largely confined to blogs and talk
radio, is now spreading among Republicans in public office or aspiring to
it. Last year Michele Bachmann, the redoubtable Tea Party hero and Minnesota
congresswoman, set the pace by announcing that she wanted "people in
Minnesota armed and dangerous" to oppose Obama administration climate
change
initiatives. In Texas, the Tea
Party favorite for governor, Debra Medina, is
positioning herself to the right of the incumbent, Rick Perry - no mean feat
given that Perry has suggested that Texas
could secede from the union. A
state sovereignty zealot, Medina
reminded those at a rally that "the tree of
freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots."
In the heyday of 1960s left-wing radicalism, no liberal Democratic
politicians in Washington could
be found endorsing groups preaching violent
revolution. The right has a different history. In the months before McVeigh's
mass murder, Helen Chenoweth and Steve Stockman, then representing Idaho
and
Texas in Congress, publicly
empathized with the conspiracy theories of the
far right that fueled his anti-government obsessions.
In his Times article on the Tea Party right, Barstow
profiled Pam Stout, a
once apolitical Idaho retiree
who cast her lot with a Tea Party group allied
with Beck's 9/12 Project, the Birch Society and the Oath Keepers, a rising
militia group of veterans and former law enforcement officers who champion
disregarding laws they oppose. She frets that "another civil war"
may be in
the offing. "I don't see us being the ones to start it," she told Barstow,
"but I would give up my life for my country."
Whether consciously or coincidentally, Stout was echoing Palin's memorable
final declaration during her appearance at the National Tea Party Convention
earlier this month: "I will live, I will die for the people of America,
whatever I can do to help." It's enough to make you wonder who is palling
around with terrorists now.
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