Iowa Rep. Steve King: This man only looks rational.
It’s one thing for talk-radio buffoons like Rush Limbaugh to say ridiculous things. After all, Americans consume a lot of media that could qualify as ridiculous, from Jerry Springer to Housewives of Orange County to the latest Adam Sandler movie (choose between Sandler in drag — Jack and Jill — and Sandler with a mullet — That’s My Boy!). To some degree, we pay celebrities, with our eyeballs and advertising dollars, to be ridiculous. There’s a reason that the comparatively sedate Mike Huckabee has done little to break Limbaugh’s dominance of the right-wing airwaves. But we supposedly elect politicians to run our country and represent us in the legislature, not to put on a freak show. Shouldn’t we have higher standards for the people we reward with our tax dollars and votes than those to whom we devote a few lazy hours on the couch?
We should, of course, but the evidence is piling up that we don’t.
It’s not a phenomenon restricted to candidates running for office, who might see outrageous claims and attention-grabbing statements (see: Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell) as a way to shoehorn their way into evening news cycle. Increasingly, politicians already in office say inflammatory things for the sheer sake of being inflammatory: Maine Governor Paul LePage compares IRS agents to the Gestapo, or Florida Representative Allen West announces that “there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party.” There is a line between calculated headline-grabbing and dishonoring the office — and both LePage and West have crossed it. If a government “of the people, by the people” is supposed to be an expression of our highest American values, what values are these men conveying?
This week’s line-crossers commit particularly egregious violations of the spirit of public service, not to mention particularly egregious violations of sanity. First up: Iowa Rep. Steve King held a tele-townhall meeting to update his constituents on the important matters “under investigation” by the representative’s office. Asked whether he believes President Obama is a natural born citizen, King assured the questioner that he is on top of the conspiracy that put a foreigner in the White House. Unfortunately, that wily Kenyan is probably home free until the election:
We went down into the Library of Congress and we found a microfiche there of two newspapers in Hawaii each of which had published the birth of Barack Obama. It would have been awfully hard to fraudulently file the birth notice of Barack Obama being born in Hawaii and get that into our public libraries and that microfiche they keep of all the newspapers published. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some other explanations on how they might’ve announced that by telegram from Kenya. The list goes on. But drilling into that now, even if we could get a definitive answer and even if it turned out that Barack Obama was conclusively not born in America, I don’t think we could get that case sold between now and November.
The conspirators in the early years.
Well, Stanley Dunham (Obama’s mother) must have been quite the soothsayer. You won’t find a Manchurian candidate more perfect than the president; his mother hatched a plot 51 years ago to have a baby in a foreign country (why Durham, as an American citizen, didn’t just give birth stateside is unclear), fake documents to get him into the U.S., then shepherd him into the Oval Office. Even more impressive, she achieved that last goal from beyond the grave. What a woman!
That the whole birther meme is still being talked up by supposedly intelligent people — people responsible for the future of Social Security, health care, and our national defense — is frightening. Even more frightening is the attempt by liberals, of all people, to rationalize this craziness as just another facet of our dysfunctional politics. Gridlock, attack ads, Swift-boating — all are unsavory, but none rise to the level of Area 51 nuttiness. To pretend that these things exist on some sort of continuum, that one is just an amusing intensification of the other, is the ultimate in false equivalence. Times columnist Frank Bruni, with whom I usually agree but who should really stick to writing about popular culture, draws a comparison between the birtherism of Donald Trump and recent accusations by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that Mitt Romney hasn’t paid anything in taxes for the last ten years. “Do one tribe’s antics justify the other’s?” he asks, as if Reid wondering whether the American tax system is overly generous to multi-millionaires is somehow akin to alleging the president is a lying, birth-certificate-faking foreign agent. Here’s Bruni:
Reid’s defenders will say that Romney’s reluctance to release more than one complete year of tax returns (at least so far) makes clear that he’s hiding something, which must be flushed out one way or another . . . But if you’re going to subscribe to that sort of reasoning, “You might as well put a dead cocker spaniel on your head and start yelling about birth certificates,” said Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show,” flashing a photograph of the quizzically coiffed Donald Trump, who to my eyes was wearing either an Irish setter or maybe a Pomeranian. Stewart’s point — an excellent one — is that the crazies who insist that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States are Reid’s philosophical and strategic kinfolk.
The irony is, Stewart regularly rails against false equivalence on his show, condemning mainstream pundits for accusing both parties of playing to their bases, when the GOP has moved staggeringly further to the right than the Democrats can dream of moving to the left.
In their denunciations of Reid, however, both Bruni and Stewart are playing to the sanctimonious center, which demands politeness from all without differentiating between incivility and beyond-the-pale craziness. Reid and Trump would only be “strategic kinfolk” if Reid accused Romney of harboring not only a secret plot to establish polygamy in America (the “Obama is un-American” subtext to Trump’s accusations) but a file of marriage licenses to 12 of Ann Romney’s sister-wives as well. Reid’s charges may be unfounded, but he is not alleging that Romney did anything illegal, only something that voters would look on with askance. Overlooked in all the conservative consternation over Reid’s remarks is that he has not accused the Republican candidate of cheating on his taxes; he alleges only that Romney was able to find enough loopholes and engage in enough offshore-haven arbitrage to reduce his tax burden to zero. Romney likely did pay taxes in the last decade, but during the 2008-09 downturn, there’s a real possibility that he booked enough losses – as many investors did – to have a tax bill of nada. If you think there’s nothing separating a supposed half-century conspiracy to manufacture Obama’s citizenship with the allegation that the tax code is so friendly to millionaires that Romney owed nothing to the Treasury . . . well, if you think that, I don’t have a case to make to you, because logic is obviously not doing the trick.
Bruni quotes John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House, as bemoaning what Bruni calls “the casual slander of Romney.” I can almost imagine Boehner tearing up as he laments to Fox News Radio about, oh, the injustice of it all. “It’s one of the problems that occurs here in Washington,” he said. “People run out there without any facts and just make noise.” Funny, it must not be a very pressing problem, because Boehner has been missing in action as his caucus paints the president as “the other” and dispenses wisdom about tracking down birth certificates. The Speaker has time to castigate Harry Reid, yet he won’t condemn inflammatory and racist statements by members of his own party.
The debate over the lack of civility in politics is worth having, but while the coarsening of public discourse probably contributes to Rep. King’s perception that there is little to lose in promoting wild conspiracy theories, it is not the proximate cause of such nonsense. Nastiness in politics is a more nuanced issue; as many commentators have pointed out, personal attacks have a long and storied history, beginning with John Adams’ smear of Thomas Jefferson as “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow” and Jefferson’s fabrication of dastardly plans by Adams to go to war with France. (Adams’ description of his opponent as “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father” does, however, bring to mind the right’s favored picture of Obama as a Muslim, anti-colonial Kenyan.)
It’s hard to defend malicious ad hominem attacks, but it’s also true that politics is nasty for a reason: it’s not small ball. Women’s reproductive freedom, the future of safety net programs like Medicaid and TANF, the level at which the wealthy are asked to kick in to support the country — these are not trivial issues. Venomous remarks and vituperative rhetoric can advance a point, however crudely, and the most effective negative ads work because they confirm a pre-existing narrative (Romney’s notorious stiffness is spoofed in an ad featuring the candidate warbling the national anthem) or contain a grain of truth (when Obama said “you didn’t build that,” he really was expressing a we’re-all-in-this-together attitude). By contrast, statements like Rep. King’s contain no more truth than Bigfoot tales and Loch Ness legends. Harry Reid’s history of what the NYT calls “tart-tongued volleys” — he has said Romney is “kind of a joke” and had to apologize for calling George W. Bush a “loser,” though no mea culpa was forthcoming for labeling Bush a “liar” — amounts to small potatoes next to the typical conservative descriptions of Obama as “fascist” and his policies as an “ultimate vision of Orwellian statism” that will “spell the end of America as we’ve always known it.” So when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell deplores Reid’s allegations about Romney’s taxes as “beneath the dignity of his office,” you have to wonder what he feels Steve King contributes to the dignity of America’s greatest deliberative body. “Dignity” is not the word that comes to mind when I consider King’s myriad other crusades, including his quest to revive the McCarthy-era House Internal Security Committee to investigate “the ugly spread of Marxism in America, its roots, branches and current manifestations, particularly within the administration of President Barack Hussein Obama.”
Increasingly, taking nonsensical positions is a legitimate political strategy. For all I know, Frank Luntz hosts conference calls to advise Republicans on bolstering their “brand” by associating themselves with radical, headline-garnering ideas. Case in point: Arizona’s Joe Arpaio, the self-proclaimed “America’s toughest sheriff” whose notoriously harsh treatment of illegal immigrants prompted a Justice Department lawsuit for discriminatory policing (cost to county taxpayers: $50 million), recently trekked to Hawaii to personally investigate Obama’s “fraudulent” birth certificate. You might expect mainstream conservative politicians to distance themselves from such behavior, yet Rolling Stone describes him as “the go-to media prop for conservative politicians, from state legislators to presidential candidates, who want to be seen as immigration hard-liners.” As Arpaio shows the Rolling Stone reporter into his office, he revels in the attention: “I had Michele Bachmann sitting right there. All these presidential guys coming to see me!”
What does it say about conservatives that they are attracted to candidates who pander to a guy like this?
Next up in Kool-Aid Drinking News is Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Kelly, commenting on the mandate by the Department of Health and Human Services that insurers cover contraception, which went into effect August 1:
I know in your mind you can think of times when America was attacked. One is December 7th, that’s Pearl Harbor day. The other is September 11th, and that’s the day of the terrorist attack. I want you to remember August the 1st, 2012, the attack on our religious freedom. That is a day that will live in infamy, along with those other dates.
Democratic Rep. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, an 87-year-old veteran who was actually at Pearl Harbor, called the comparison “misguided” and said, “It is complete nonsense to suggest that a matter discussed, debated, and approved by the Congress and the President is akin to a surprise attack that killed nearly 2,500 people and launched our nation into the second World War.” Given the chance to walk back his remarks in an interview with the conservative website Newsmax, Kelly instead doubled down on the sentiment — or, as Newsmax put it, “responded to Inouye’s attack.” Putting aside the apparent right-wing confusion over the meaning of the word “attack,” Kelly called the mandate “an undeniable and unprecedented attack on Americans’ First Amendment rights.” He elaborated:
Our freedoms and way of life have been under attack before, from both internal and external threats. If we fail to defend our constitutional rights, we risk losing the freedoms that so many brave men and women have given their lives to defend throughout the course of our nation’s history. We will not turn a blind eye to the HHS mandate’s attack on our religious freedom and we will work to stop this unconstitutional mandate from taking away our God-given and constitutionally protected freedoms.
Uh-huh.
Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Kelly
My general Nazi Rule — that anyone likening political opponents to Nazis should automatically be disqualified from intelligent conversation — applies here. That Kelly apparently expects us to take him seriously is more than a little disturbing. Who compares women’s reproductive freedom to the combined deaths of nearly 6,000 people? (Oh, right: someone who believes abortion “kills” millions of “babies” and considers the morning-after pill, which is included in the HHS mandate, to be an “abortifacient”). Even more disturbing is that many of Kelly’s conservative constituents probably don’t disagree with him. The hyperbolic hand-wringing over the contraception mandate has reached amazing heights, with right-wingers alleging that it amounts to an unconstitutional violation of employers’ religious freedom to deny their workers comprehensive healthcare. (OK, those last words are mine.) The conservative American Spectator hyperventilates that President Obama despises Christians, “reducing them to the status of serfs in his planned secularist and socialist state.” George Neumayr writes that, if businesses “refuse to subsidize the sex lives of their employees, Obama can now bankrupt them through punitive fines.” The implication here is that insurance is not monetary compensation but a “subsidy” doled out by those generous job creators; that women are not entitled to use their paychecks — because what is employer-sponsored health insurance but deferred wages? — as they see fit. Should female employees be forced to save their receipts so that their personal spending can be audited for purchases of birth control pills and IUDs? After all, the employer provided that money; doesn’t its use for baby-killing also trample freedom of religion? For all the conservative outrage about the Affordable Care Act ostensibly putting government bureaucrats “between you and your doctor,” they are strangely OK with putting your boss’s omniscient old man in the sky between you and your insurance options.
While both sides of the contraception/abortion debate are passionate, the rhetoric on the right stands out because it is so disproportionate to the cause. Comparing anything to the Holocaust, as pro-lifers regularly do with abortion, is insulting to the millions of living, breathing people (not fetuses) who died in Hitler’s death camps. When pro-choice advocates argue against restrictions on abortion, they invoke the specter of backroom procedures and a return to the 1950s — scary scenarios, but hardly close to World War II or 9/11. I have yet to see a Planned Parenthood mailer that reads, “Republican Plan to Defund Women’s Health Initiative Will Kill More People Than Hitler.”
It’s not that liberals don’t have their share of wingnuts, but those wingnuts tend to be more loosely affiliated with the party; Bill Maher has indeed said nasty things about Sarah Palin, but last time I checked, Maher was not drawing a government salary. He’s an entertainer on the level of Limbaugh and can be just as coarse and asinine, though I’d personally take Maher’s attempts at humor over Limbaugh’s assaults on reason any day. Democratic politicians can be just as vicious on the campaign trail as Republicans, but there is a difference between assailing an opponent’s record (that’s politics) and spouting nonsense (that’s crazy). But the key distinction between the parties, though, lies in the disparate ways each responds to nonsense from elected officials or candidates. Republicans embrace bomb-throwers — just look at Allen West, the Tea Party favorite and potential McCarthy successor (see above) who frequently likens Obama’s policies to slavery.
Democrats, to their credit, suffer fools less lightly. Take Mark Clayton, an anti-gay-marriage activist and conspiracy theorist who believes the feds are constructing, as Mother Jones puts it, “a massive, four-football-field wide superhighway from Mexico City to Toronto as part of a secret plot to establish a new North American Union that will bring an end to America as we know it.” (He also believes, in his own words, that anyone protesting the liberals’ “godless new world order” will eventually be locked in “a bone-crushing prison camp similar to the one Alexander Solzhenitsyn was sent or to one of FEMA’s prison camps.”) When this intellectual light won the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Tennessee, the state party swiftly disavowed the nominee, denouncing his involvement in a “known hate group in Washington, D.C.” promising “not do anything to promote or support him in any way,” and encouraging Tennessee voters to write in a different candidate in November. Compare this to the Tennessee GOP, which has enthusiastically advanced bills in the state legislature to ban the teaching of evolution and criminalize discussion of homosexuality in public schools, and which backed away from a proposal to punish “material support” for sharia law with 15 years in prison only after a public outcry. Of course, just as soon as Mother Jones writes waggishly, “the local GOP . . . has an opening: It can be the party of rationality,” Tennessee’s Republican delegation manages to embarrass itself again. Apparently, state representative Kelly Keisling created an online stir when he forwarded an e-mail to his constituents claiming that the Obama administration is planning to stage an assassination attempt “that would be blamed on ‘white supremacists’ and subsequently used to enrage black and Hispanic communities driving them to rioting all across the nation.”
Get your tinfoil hats right here, just $2.50 apiece.
The proliferation of off-the-wall claims by elected officials like Keisling, Kelly and King (hey, maybe there’s a conspiracy about names that begin with “K”) raises real questions: Is our democracy so broken that demonstrably unqualified people can weasel their way into office? Or do American citizens actually support investigations of the president’s birth certificate as a worthwhile use of their tax dollars? The latter possibility, that my conservative neighbors truly believe that birth control is tantamount to mass murder, is even worse than the former. I’d almost rather think that the system is irreversibly corrupt than that people other than National Review writers view Democrats as “opponents of morality” and the contraception-mandate-opposing Catholic Church as “the only major institution standing in the way of efforts to permit sexual exploitation, polygamy, same-sex “marriage,” and other cultural assaults upon children’s welfare is the Church.”
I used to roll my eyes at the bumper sticker reading, “If You’re Not Outraged, You’re Not Paying Attention,” and I still think there’s a lot in politics not worth getting angry about. But the ease with which society accepts such patently false statements from the very people we should be holding to higher standards is outrageous. It’s easy to blame Reps. Kelly and King for making imbecilic remarks, but they only have a platform for those remarks because “we the people” keep giving it to them. Before the next election, perhaps we should ask ourselves: Who are the real imbeciles here?
. . . So Well Read. . . 