The Don Siegelman case recently publicized on
60 Minutes marks yet another nasty convergence between reality and the “You’re-with-us-or-you’re-against-us” rhetoric driving the American right these days. For anyone who somehow managed to miss the story, which aired on February 24th, Don Siegelman was the Democratic ex-governor of Alabama. He is currently serving a prison term for what looks like a politically motivated frame-up. His greatest “crime” was apparently being a powerful and popular Democrat.
There’s been a good bit of emoting from the Alabama GOP in response. Before the
60 Minutes segment even broadcast they sent out a press release that was almost British in its dignified anger, bristling with Peter Cushing-ish words like “perfidy,” “ludicrous charges,” and “grotesque imaginings” and describing the segment as a “hatchet job.” Afterwards, the Alabama GOP demanded a retraction. "Only the most committed anti-Rove/Bush activist could swallow such a tale," wrote party chairman Rep. Mike Hubbard.
“What?” The right wing sputters, opening its eyes very wide and laying a hand upon its chest to still the pounding of its outraged heart. “You say Karl Rove wrecked someone’s life and career using trumped up criminal charges merely because he was a political threat to the Republicans?”
“Why, that’s… that’s just crazy talk!”
Of course, the problem is that the right has, for the past twenty years, been doing its best to blur in the minds of thousands of people, the difference between being a liberal or a Democrat or anyone else perceived as an adversary of the G.O.P., and being a criminal. At the rock-bottom level you’ve got the
Freepers Michael Savage, and that
fun bunch at KSFO wishing that Democrats or other perceived critics of Bush could be arrested and charged with treason, or hanged, or electrocuted slowly and painfully in defective electric chairs. Higher up on the food chain you’ve got more well known personalities like
Sean Hannity,
Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter describing Harry Reid as “a propaganda minister for our enemies,” and coverage of the Haditha scandal as “a gang rape by the Democratic Party… to finally take us out in the war against Iraq,” or writing bestselling books with titles like
Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.
And at the top you have GOP strategists who’ve exploited this equation of dissent with disloyalty and criminal behavior and consider themselves clever bunnies indeed for doing so. As far back as 1994, Newt Gingrich described supporters of Bill Clinton as “the enemies of normal Americans.” At a
2005 Conservative Party fundraiser in Manhattan Karl Rove opined "Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Sen. Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."
The string that holds all these nasty little pearls together, from Free Republic to the DC Beltway, can be found in a 2001 online essay written by someone named Eric Heubeck for the Free Congress Foundation and entitled “
The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement.” The Free Congress Foundation, I should point out, is a conservative think tank headed by Paul Weyrich, with
close ties to Karl Rove.
“We must channel undesirable impulses to serve good purposes,”…wrote Heubeck. “We must be feared, so that they (the opposition) will think twice before opening their mouths…We must learn to treat leftists as natural disasters or rabid dogs. If we act as if this were in fact true (of course, it is not), we will not needlessly expend our energy on being upset with our opponents.”
In short, Heubeck advocates spreading unreasoning loathing among the masses and using it as a political weapon. After reading his essay it’s difficult to imagine Heubeck – or anyone else at the Free Congress Foundation -- being shocked or upset by the prospect of imprisoning a prominent Democrat solely because he’s a prominent Democrat. It’s certainly consistent with “channeling undesirable impulses.”
In the seven years since it was published, it looks like Heubeck’s strategy has been used to good effect. As language from the right equating liberalism with criminality becomes more and more mainstreamed, the idea of sending someone to prison on a flimsy pretext because they’re a powerful Democrat has become more and more palatable to a certain segment of the American population. The recent scandal surrounding the firing of attorneys in the Justice Department who were reluctant to pursue weak cases against Democrats indicates that “certain segment” is not confined to the relatively powerless crackpots who post to Free Republic and send mash notes to Ann Coulter.
One of the most depressing successes of the right has been the shutting down of dialogue. Online, the far right has pretty much made it their policy to talk only to other right-wingers in echo chambers like Free Republic or Little Green Footballs or, (at a rock-bottom level of malicious stupidity that makes FR look like Harvard) Conservapedia. When a conversation with a liberal does take place, offline or online, it tends to be for a very limited amount of time in venues where the right-winger has control, like talk radio or on a cable news show with a sympathetic host.
The people who utter statements like Karl Rove’s vile insinuation that liberals are motivated by the desire to put our troops in greater danger, or Hannity’s equation of Reid saying that the “
War is lost” with being a “propaganda minister for our enemies,” are rarely confronted directly and in detail with the actual meanings and implications of their words. And that’s exactly how they want it to stay.
Because it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the question to ask them, whether they are operating on the level of Freepers or of eager young aides to Karl Rove, is not “Is Don Siegelman in prison now because he’s a Democrat.”
The question to ask them is, “would it bother you if he were?”
Don’t assume, even for a minute, that the answer would be a simple and unequivocal “yes.”
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