The GOP's Double Standard on Anger

By Nat Parry
March 27, 2010

In the wake of the bitter health-care debate and some ugly incidents of violence against Democratic members of Congress, there have been some belated – and halfhearted – appeals from Republican leaders to tamp down the fiery rhetoric on the Right.  

In a statement on Wednesday, House Minority Leader John Boehner said the recent wave of violence and physical threats against Democrats is “unacceptable” – but he was quick to point out that he sympathized with the motivations:

“I know many Americans are angry over this health-care bill, and that Washington Democrats just aren’t listening. But, as I’ve said, violence and threats are unacceptable.”

While stumping for Sen. John McCain’s reelection in Arizona on Friday, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin also dialed back from the implications of her own recent comments, like telling her backers to “reload” and putting crosshairs on the districts of endangered Democrats.

“We know violence isn’t the answer,” Palin said. “When we take up our arms, we’re talking about our vote.”

She also blamed the controversy on “this BS coming from the lame-stream media, lately, about us inciting violence.”

So, while Republican leaders may be disavowing specific acts of political violence, their broader message appears to be that these feelings of anger are a healthy and legitimate response to objectionable Democratic policies.

This lenient attitude toward expressions of anger may come as a surprise to many progressives who remember that several years ago anger over President George W. Bush’s actions, such as having his political allies on the U.S. Supreme Court put him in the White House and his launching an unprovoked war in Iraq, was dismissed as a sign of mental illness.

Neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer (a onetime psychiatrist) dubbed it “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” a term he coined to describe “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency – nay – the very existence of George W. Bush.”

The term was picked up by commentators in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Fox News and the blogosphere.

While Krauthammer came up with his diagnosis of angry liberals in 2003, its origins could be traced to the earliest days of the Bush administration, when Americans were told they must unite behind the new President despite the fact that he had assumed the White House after losing the national popular vote and stopping the counting of ballots in Florida.

On Inauguration Day 2001, as thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators protested in the streets, Bush promised to usher in a new era of civility in Washington. Most of the press corps and congressional Democrats took him at his word. Those Americans who were still bitter about the outcome of Election 2000 were told to “get over it.”

Anger on the Left

This pressure to forget the circumstances behind Bush's "victory" became overwhelming after the 9/11 terror attacks with the American people rallying behind the President in a show of solidarity. But anger on the Left persisted, demonstrated by a flourishing of anti-Bush Web sites.

As the months wore on -- and Bush led the nation toward war with Iraq -- these Web sites provided a daily alternative source of information that proved invaluable. Readers of these sites were more likely to question the rationale for invading Iraq and the legitimacy of Bush’s claims about Iraq’s WMD, contributing to an unprecedented pre-war protest movement that brought millions into the streets of American cities.

In March 2003, when Bush launched the war despite these voices calling for restraint, many Americans experienced anger and despondency, which seemed like a natural response to a government disregarding their concerns.

When no WMD stockpiles were found after the invasion, anti-Bush anger grew among those who had opposed the war, but so too did the conventional wisdom that the “angry left” was delusional, irrational and unreasonable.

Heading into the 2004 presidential campaign, “liberal anger” was considered an albatross that could pull down any Democratic politician who was tied to it. An early victim was former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. Although Dean emerged as an early favorite in the Democratic primaries, his fiery speeches were considered by some commentators as “too angry.”

“Mainstream America,” pundits warned, would not relate to Dean’s “angry persona,” an argument that contributed to the collapse of his candidacy and the selection of the calmer John Kerry, who was considered more “electable.”

The avoidance of anger was taken to absurd extremes at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where the Kerry camp ordered speakers not to criticize Bush harshly or even at all. The keynote address by then-Senate candidate Barack Obama didn’t even mention Bush’s name, stressing instead a positive message about America’s traditions and potential.

Supposedly polarizing figures, such as documentarian Michael Moore who had produced the anti-Bush film “Fahrenheit 9-11,” were kept at arm’s length.

Despite -- or perhaps because -- the Democrats showed such equanimity, Bush retained the White House in 2004. Still, the “angry” label kept dogging the Democratic Party, which continued trying to mute harsh rank-and-file criticism of Bush’s policies on Iraq and many other issues.

The GOP so frequently painted Democrats as irrationally angry that the criticism took on the appearance of a national political strategy.

At his 2006 State of the Union address, for example, Bush warned that “our differences cannot be allowed to harden into anger.” The next month Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman said on ABC News that Hillary Clinton “seems to have a lot of anger.”

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, denounced Democrats’ criticism of Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove as “more of the same kind of anger and lashing out that has become the substitute for bipartisan action and progress.”

Deviant Emotion

In those days, anger was considered dangerously subversive, a deviant emotion that contradicted the essence of what it means to be an American. Real Americans simply don’t get angry, the message seemed to be, and if you do, you should probably seek professional help.

The Republican strategy of insisting that the Democrats play nice proved very effective through the first six years of Bush’s presidency. Indeed, the only time anger seemed justified was when right-wing voices on talk radio and Fox News were excoriating Bush's critics for displaying even relatively mild disapproval of the President.

Ironically, it wasn’t until Campaign 2006 – when Democrats sharpened their criticism of Bush over the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina and other bungled policies – that the party began its comeback with a stunning congressional victory in November 2006.

Still, the anti-Bush rhetoric and protests never reached the level of today’s right-wing fury against President Obama.

And just compare the Republican attitudes toward political “anger” during the Bush years with their new-found appreciation for anger today. The anger now is fully justified because “Washington Democrats just aren’t listening,” John Boehner maintains.

In other words, if you were angry about Bush’s actions, you were irrational, but if you’re furious about Obama’s policies on health reform, your fury is considered “understandable.”

Even while calling for some restraint, Republicans have continued to feed the right-wing anger by putting the blame for the anger back on the Democrats. In a blaming-the-victim twist, House Republican Whip Eric Cantor accused Democrats of provoking violence by complaining about violence.

"It is reckless to use these incidents as media vehicles for political gain," the Virginia Republican said, specifically faulting Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Democratic National Chairman Tim Kaine for "dangerously fanning the flames by suggesting that these incidents be used as a political weapon."

Cantor said, "By ratcheting up the rhetoric some will only inflame these situations to dangerous levels."

Riding the Tiger

The Republican leadership appears to want it both ways, riding the tiger of right-wing political anger to victories in November while blaming the Democrats for any damage the tiger might cause.

This Republican strategy – and its possible consequences – are surely keeping Democrats awake at night, wondering if the death threats they’ve been receiving are empty bluster, or a serious cause for concern.

Rep. Tom Perriello, D-Virginia, whose brother’s home suffered a cut gas line after two Virginia Tea Party activists mistakenly listed it as Perriello’s home address, is not satisfied with Minority Leader Boehner ’s limited reprimand of the right-wing extremists.

“What he was saying was, for those of you who are threatening people’s children, we want you to channel that anger into the campaign,” said Perriello. “No, we want those people to go to jail.”

But it may be difficult for Republicans to abandon the anger on the Right that they helped foment. Since the beginning of the Obama presidency, Republicans have been hyping charges of creeping socialism and a loss of American liberties.

Those are fighting words for many Americans on the Right. And as this right-wing anger has escalated following the health-care vote, U.S. law enforcement agencies will start to take a closer look at right-wing movements.

When the FBI begins investigating, conservative paranoia over Obama could fuel a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which heavily armed right-wingers feel persecuted and strike out in even greater anger.

It’s a violent cycle that was last seen in the United States during the early years of Democrat Bill Clinton’s presidency -- when angry Republican rhetoric about his legitimacy gave rise to armed militias and to talk about "black helicopters" and plots to eradicate American sovereignty. That contributed to Timothy McVeigh and a couple of other right-wing extremists getting together to bomb the Oklahoma City federal building on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people.

With that history in mind, it might be time to heed Bush’s 2006 warning, whether disingenuous or not, that “our differences cannot be allowed to harden into anger.”

Nat Parry is the co-author of Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.

Let The Sun Shine In......

A Crying Shame!

In my 61 years on this planet, I never imagined that I would come anywhere near agreeing with an article such as this. I doubt I would have finished the article before I discounted it as anti-Semitic drivel, until recently.

 I hate to say it. It makes me sick to my stomach to write these words, but the events of the last 8 years, on top of all the policies and behavior I have managed to ignore in the so-called holy land and surrounding areas as well as at home for the last 40 or so years, have caused me to question everything. I guess it took something like 9/11 to jar me out of habitual thinking drummed into me as a child.

I was raised under the cloud of the, then, recent horror of the Nazi crimes against humanity. My mother, in particular, was extremely impressed by the criminal cruelty to the Jewish people. By impressed, I mean it caused her to be very protective of the Jewish people. She would not countenance “Jew jokes” nor anything else she considered anti-Jewish. I grew up to be like her in that way. A friend of mine once said that she always thought of me when something “god-awful” happened in the place called Palestine by some and Israel by others. (”I know you’ll be looking for a Jew to protect.” LOL!)

I have, at times, been very outspoken in my defense of Jewish people everywhere.

Mother warned me often that I should never think that “it” can’t happen here. Of course, she was talking about the wholesale persecution, even unto death, of any hated minority. (I never knew if she had read C.S. Lewis or had merely come up with the warning on her own. ) It didn’t take much to convince me. I grew up in the deep south. I never doubted that “it” could happen.

Now, I must be equally outspoken in questioning my country’s knee jerk defense of Israel as if it is somehow exceptional in the same way that the Neocons see the U.S. as exceptional; entitled to do any damn thing they want to in the name of something I no longer understand as I once thought I did.

I have one Jewish friend where I live now. (Of course, I still I have others across the country in the many places where I have lived in the past.) Several years ago she said that she might move to Israel where she could feel safe. My jaw hit the floor. This woman is a highly educated professional. I stammered, asking her to listen to what she was saying. “You can’t possibly think that Israel is a safe place to be!”

Sometimes I cannot help but think that some of our fellow citizens are not always rational about the issue of Israel and Jewish Neocons are not alone in their crusade to defend Israel, no matter what it takes or who gets hurt in the process, even when Israeli policies are responsible for the misery, suffering and death of an untold number of Palestinians.

What’s worse, Neocons in both Israel and the U.S. have allied themselves with christian fundamentalist (end-timers, rapture Christians, Dominionists and others of the far-right religious fringe). In my mind, this is an unholy alliance if there ever was one. “Cynical” is the word that comes to mind and cynicism is a state of mind that should be avoided at all costs; it shows a pathological disintegration in the nation of Israel and in her supporters in the U.S..

The ghettos in which the Palestinians live are reminiscent of other ghettos filled with Europe’s Jewish population before and during the terror that was Nazi Germany.

Allow me to make clear that I am aghast at terrorist atrocities by Hamas or any other group or nation, no matter at whom it is directed. Nevertheless, the U.S. has lost all credibility as an honest broker of peace and, of course, social and economic justice that must accompany a lasting peace in a land made unholy by the blood of innocents and the theft of the land itself.

Who are the innocents? The people from all three Abrahamic traditions who can envision true peace, even in this historically war-torn area of the world; those yet too young to hate others simply because it is “tradition” to do so and those who refuse to live a hateful life.

The Allied powers of WWII made a mistake when they took land away from people who had lived in the land known as Palestine for as long as anyone can remember and by giving that land to Eastern and Western European Jews, among others.

What’s done is done in the modern land of Palestine/Israel. I doubt we can ever undo it, at least not in my lifetime. Nevertheless, it is time to find the best of the religious teachings of the three traditions to which this land is of such apparently great importance and apply those teachings to the conflict which has, in may ways, consumed the world for the last 60 some odd years, if not since the beginning of recorded history.

In doing so, we must not ignore the deeply corrupting effects of corporatism, sometimes quite obvious and at other times hidden just beneath the excuse of religion.

And by “we,” I mean the concerned people of the world; those who are sick and tired of the carnage over a city named peace.

Kristol Clear: The Source of America’s Wars

by Maidhc Ó Cathail / December 18th, 2009

One reason neocons have been able to sow so much mischief is that they feed into deeply embedded American beliefs about democratism and ‘chosenness.’
– Paul Gottfried¹

Americans feeling let down by Barack Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan should take careful note of those who welcomed yet another “surge.”² It might help them to identify the source of their seemingly endless wars.


For instance, in a recent Washington Post opinion piece, William Kristol described Obama’s West Point speech as “encouraging.” It was “a good thing,” he said, that Obama was finally speaking as “a war president.”³

 
But if the comments on the Post website are anything to go by, few ordinary Americans take Kristol’s
armchair warmongering seriously anymore. After all, as one poster quizzically asked, “A column by William Kristol the neocon that was wrong about everything from 2000-2008?”



Although Kristol, like the rest of the neocons, “erred” about Iraq’s WMDs and Saddam’s links to Al Qaeda and 9/11, it would be a fatal error indeed to dismiss him as a fool.

In order to understand what motivates Bill Kristol’s professed hyper-patriotism, with its consistently disastrous prescriptions, it’s worth recalling how his father, Irving Kristol, reacted to Vietnam War critic Senator George McGovern. The presidential contender’s proposed cut in U.S. military expenditure would, according to the “godfather” of neoconservatism, “drive a knife in the heart of Israel.”

“Jews don’t like big military budgets,” the elder Kristol explained in a Jewish publication in 1973. “But it is now an interest of the Jews to have a large and powerful military establishment in the United States … American Jews who care about the survival of the state of Israel have to say, no, we don’t want to cut the military budget, it is important to keep that military budget big, so that we can defend Israel.”⁴

American Greatness

Following his father’s advice, William Kristol has been a fervent supporter of massive U.S. military spending. In 1996, he co-authored with Robert Kagan an influential neocon manifesto titled “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.” It recommended that “America should pursue a vision of benevolent hegemony as bold as Reagan’s in the 1980s and wield its authority unabashedly.


“The defense budget should be increased dramatically, citizens should be educated to appreciate the military’s vital work abroad, and moral clarity should direct a foreign policy that puts the heat on dictators and
 authoritarian regimes.”


In response, another influential opinion-maker, Charles Krauthammer, hailed Kristol and Kagan as “the main proponents of what you might call the American greatness school.” It is hardly a coincidence, however, that all three advocates of “American greatness” care passionately about what Irving Kristol euphemistically referred to as “the survival of the state of Israel.” Or that many of those “dictators and authoritarian regimes” just happened to stand in the way of Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.


The following year, Kristol and Kagan co-founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a pressure group which sought to advance their “neo-Reaganite” vision. In the late 1990s, they did this mainly by writing letters to Bill Clinton, urging him to oust Saddam Hussein.


In September 2000, PNAC published “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” in which they famously acknowledged that “the process of transformation … is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”


One year later, they got their wished for “new Pearl Harbor” on September 11. The mass murder of almost 3,000 Americans was, as Benjamin Netanyahu indelicately put it, “very good” for Israel.⁵


Kristol’s War


Immediately, Kristol’s Weekly Standard began linking Iraq to the attacks. Writing in The American Conservative, Scott McConnell explained the strategy: “Their rhetoric – which laid down a line from which the magazine would not waver over the next 18 months – was to link Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in virtually every paragraph, to join them at the hip in the minds of readers.”⁶


The “Saddam must go” campaign, begun in a Kristol and Kagan editorial as far back as 1997, became so relentless that Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen dubbed it “Kristol’s War.”⁷
The Iraq War has, of course, also been called “Wolfowitz’s War.” But it could just as aptly have been named after Perle, Feith, Libby, Zelikow, Lieberman, or any of the other pro-Israeli insiders who took America to war by way of deception.⁸


In “Irving Kristol, RIP,” Antiwar.com editor Justin Raimondo described Kristol’s legacy as “war, war, and yet more war, as far as the eye can see.”⁹


Unless Americans soon realize that they’ve been deceived by those for whom “American greatness” is merely a means to advance “the survival of the state of Israel,” that legacy promises to be an enduring one.

1.  Paul Gottfried, “The Transparent Cabal,” Taki’s Magazine, September 17, 2008. [↩]
2. Frederick W. Kagan, “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq,” AEI Online, January 5, 2007. [↩]
3. William Kristol, “A War President,” Washington Post, December 1, 2009. [↩]
4. Philip Weiss, “30 Years Ago, Neocons Were More Candid About Their Israel-Centered Views,” Mondoweiss, May 23, 2007. [↩]
5. James Bennet, “Spilled Blood Is Seen as Bond That Draws 2 Nations Closer,” New York Times, September 12, 2001. [↩]
6. Scott McConnell, “The Weekly Standard’s War,” American Conservative, November 21, 2005. [↩]
7. Richard H. Curtiss, “Rupert Murdoch and William Kristol: Using the Press to Advance Israel’s Interests,” Washington Report, June 2003. [↩]
8. Jeff Gates, Guilt By Association: How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War, 2008. [↩]
9. Justin Raimondo, “Irving Kristol, RIP,” Antiwar.com, September 21, 2009. [↩]

Maidhc Ó Cathail is a freelance writer. His work has been published by Al Jazeera Magazine, Antiwar.com, Dissident Voice, Khaleej Times, Palestine Chronicle and many other publications. Read other articles by Maidhc.

This article was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 9:00am and is filed under General, Israel/Palestine.



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Let The Sun Shine In......