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ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS HERALD |
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STRATEGY OF HATE Besides enjoying the ambiance at Al’s Coffee Shop, I visit there to read the Washington Post – just to keep in touch with the “alternate universe” of DC’s “other paper”. I don’t subscribe to the Post, as I can take only limited doses of its unremitting harping on the “Bush lied, people died” theme. (Also: “Republicans are incompetent; Republicans are corrupt; more government is the answer; only Democrats know how to govern; Bush is an idiot; Bush is evil; Bush is the real terrorist; Cheney is really running the place;” etc.) When I am away from the Post for a time, and have kept company with “normal culture” denizens, I begin to think that politics might be, after all, just differences of opinion between Americans of good will who want no more than what is best for the country and its people. At such times I begin to believe that our differences can’t be that serious. Our polarization is just skin-deep. We can surely work things out. But then I return to the Post and some of its opinion-writers, and I realize, once again, that these people live in another world. Such thoughts came to me last week when I read “Impeachment Imprudence” by Post columnist Harold Meyerson. The author “analyzed” the necessity of (and prospects for) impeaching President Bush – much of it interwoven with semi-jocular references to his mother’s insistence that impeachment was essential. (Mr. Meyerson’s mother is now 92.) Mr. Meyerson said he had told his mother in 2004 that impeachment was untimely because: (a) Mr. Bush might be defeated in the election; (b) “grotesque misconduct in office was not necessarily a high crime or misdemeanor;” and (c) Dick Cheney was the real power anyway. But Mother Meyerson hadn’t bought the arguments and was still pushing the Big I. Mr. M breathlessly reported that “this impeachment stuff is really getting around”, describing how it is all over the blogosphere and is the cover story in the current Harper's. Even the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has passed an impeachment resolution. (Really, has it gone that far?) Antiwar activists and civil libertarians also have “growing impeachment tendencies”. (Oh, no kidding?) Even labor unions – Mr. Meyerson’s specialty – are asking, “How can we impeach this guy?” Obviously, this juggernaut will soon reach critical mass. It’s just a matter of time. Assuring his readers that “I bow to no one in my conviction that George W. Bush's is a malevolent presidency,” Mr. Meyerson accuses Mr. Bush’s government of incompetence, dishonesty and treachery at what can only be called a traitorous level. To ensure that I have not misrepresented Mr. Meyerson’s views, I reproduce his critique in its entirety: “The leading figures of his administration manipulated facts and fabricated fictions to justify going to war in Iraq. They ignored the intelligence reports that predicted the strife that would follow Saddam Hussein's ouster, and sent our troops in harm's way with no plausible strategy for how to handle the violence and with insufficient armor to shield themselves from it. They were missing in action when a great American city and thousands of American citizens needed rescue. This administration has authorized torture, though the United States has signed conventions that forbid it. It has authorized warrantless wiretapping and surveillance, though it is plainly against the law.” Although some of these charges have been tossed about for months – even years – it is convenient to find all of them packaged in a single paragraph attributable to one person. For this I am indebted to Mr. Meyerson. He suggests that history will find Mr. Bush “as inept as James Buchanan, on whose watch the Union broke up”, and “as eager to polarize the nation to his political advantage, no matter the costs, as Richard Nixon”. Bush’s crimes probably do not rise to impeachment level, he avers, but are “merely the kind of thing that lands a president on eternal sizzle in one of Dante's lower loops”. (Really, he seems almost theologically certain about this.) His grandest denunciation: “Dereliction of duty and lying us into a war may be mortal sins, but that doesn't make them provable high crimes.” (I had no idea Mr. Meyerson was so religious.) As to the “malevolent presidency” – the dictionary defines “malevolent” as “having, showing, or arising from intense often vicious ill will, spite, or hatred.” This means Mr. Meyerson believes the Bush Administration is actually motivated by spite and hate – that Mr. Bush and his officials act out of vicious ill will. Is he getting this from his mother? My own background doesn’t let me ascribe such base motives to American leaders of any political stripe. We were raised differently. My own mother (hey – if Mr. Meyerson can do this, why can’t I?) often spoke of “the pot calling the kettle black”. She meant that some people accuse others of being as venal as they know themselves to be. They tend to characterize their enemies’ actions and motives in terms that could plausibly apply to them. I believe Mr. Meyerson is doing this. He calls Mr. Bush hateful and spiteful because he knows these are his own (and his mother’s) attitudes. Perhaps he also suspects that some “heroes” of the liberal pantheon were less than exemplary. A “malevolent presidency”? Would Mr. Meyerson say this of the hallowed Franklin Roosevelt who “ignored” early warnings of the Pearl Harbor attack, put Japanese civilians into concentration camps, bombed Germany to rubble, and refused to negotiate when the Axis would have stopped fighting? How about Harry Truman vaporizing two Japanese cities with atomic bombs and intervening in a Korean “civil war”. (Was it really our business?) Or LBJ using the Bay of Tonkin “incident” (which probably didn’t even happen) as a pretext for war in Vietnam? And speaking of “spiteful” – who was so mad at a celebrated aviator for opposing American intervention in Europe that he denied him a military commission? (Yes – that was the beatified FDR. Charles Lindbergh actually flew 50 combat missions over the Pacific as a civilian “test pilot” because FDR spitefully refused to commission him.) In his Bush-bashing Mr. Meyerson employs a classic ploy pioneered by the brilliant political tactician, Josef Goebbels. It is called The Big Lie. Dr. Goebbels saw that any lie, however huge, would be believed if it were repeated often enough. Stalin, Hitler, Mao Ze-dung, Pol Pot, and a long list of other tyrants used the Big Lie to great advantage. By using it today, today’s “liberals” – Mr. Meyerson among them – are Hitler’s spiritual heirs. Their incessant mantra, “Bush lied, Bush lied, Bush lied” – although unsupported by plausible evidence – has implanted this idea of presidential dishonesty firmly in the consciousness of the American body politic. Ignorant street-loungers, busy thirty-somethings, union workers, soccer-moms and nonagenarians (!) are all likely to agree that the president “lied” us into Iraq. Mr. Meyerson and other partisans cheerfully admit that Bush-hatred is now a significant political faction. They think they can exploit it. The Strategy of Hate bears a poisonous bud. To find it in full flower you must go back to pre-Civil War days when decades of preaching hate in both North and South finally rent the nation – causing bloody civil war and culminating in Mr. Lincoln’s death. In 1856 Representative Preston Brooks caned Senator Charles Sumner into insensibility in the Senate chamber over Mr. Sumner’s personal insults of Brooks’ kinsman, Senator Andrew Butler. We’re not quite there, today, but how far off can this or its like be in the present climate? No doubt both sides are spewing hate. I won’t listen to some radical-right talk-jockeys because their “message” is as disgusting as Mr. Meyerson’s. More pragmatically, I believe hate is a strategic loser for either party. Americans have never responded well to it, and they will not do so now. Voters will not go to the polls to elect Democrats so they can impeach George W. Bush. Mr. Meyerson is mistaken in this expectation, but he (and his mother) can do considerable damage trying to make it happen. He needs to find another political advisor. Mom is past it.
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