The Christian Right, war and Americanism

My Blue Voice partners Tankwoman and Duane have both laid in to Karl Rove and the Republicans for their latest round of attacks on Democrats as unpatriotic. This is only one recent example in which prominent Republicans used hate-mongering, radical rhetoric of the kind David Neiwert calls "eliminationist."

None of this is entirely new for today's Halliburton Republicans. After the 9/11 attacks, some people, like the radical pack that David Horowitz spotlights on his FrontPageMag.com site, could hardly wait until the day was over to start blasting Democrats as traitors and allies of The Terrorists.

This latest round of McCarthyist talk from prominent Republicans is happening in the context of rolling out a new push to generate support for Bush's Iraq War policies. It seems to be essentially an update of Richard Nixon's strategy to maintain support for the Vietnam War by blaming the war critics for all the problems and accusing/implying that they are less than patriotic. My name for the Bush-Cheney-Rove version is the Nixon-on-OxyContin strategy, in recognition of the junkie bigot Rush Limbaugh's drug of choice.

The initial rollout will culminate in Bush's war speech on Tuesday.

Plus, the Defense Department has been ordered by a federal court to make public additional photographs from the torture chambers in Abu Ghuraib, some of which are considerably more graphic than the ones that have become so familiar. Those will be coming out over the next few weeks. And the Bush administration and the Party echo chamber are pretty adept at bullying the mainstream press into soft-peddling coverage of embarassing news. The firestorm of criticism that brought Dick Durbin to foolishly make a tearful confession of his sinfulness for having objected to criminal torture is probably aimed in large part at blunting the public and Congressional reaction to the new photos.

One of the things that I will be watching is to see how the War Preachers and the various Christian Right fans respond to this latest intensification of the Republicans' authoritarian approach to government and politics. And to the next round of Abu Ghuraib torture pictures.

We can perhaps get a clue from this item appearing in the "News for the Family" section of James Dobson's Focus on the Family Web site: Left's Love for Radical Islam Examined by Jeff Trobee 06/13/05.

The article praises - surprise, surprise - one of David Horowitz's radical-right polemics to paint Democrats as Enemies of the State:

Is there a link between radical Islam and the American left? "Unholy Alliance," a new book by David Horowitz, says the two groups are working together to affect U.S. policy.

Horowitz contends that the left and radical Muslims are "working day and night to undermine the institutions of American society, sabotage our nation's war on terror and help our enemies prevail."

Well, let's see: the Democrats have generally been pushing much harder to focus on the threat of terrorism, and Islamic jihadist groups in particular, than the Republicans have. Critics of the Iraq War said before it started that it would be a huge distraction from the fight against the jihadists. And that it was likely to polarize the Muslim world against America in a way that would make the anti-jihadist fight and the effort to bring al-Qaeda to justice much more difficult.

Those working with a reality-based approach to the world can easily see that those things have happened. The Iraq War was a choice between invading Iraq, on the one hand, and pursuing the "global war on terrorism" (GWOT) in the most effective way. The Iraq War only became a part of the GWOT in any meaningful sense after the US had occupied the country and Rummy's lacky of planning and his troop-level decisions allowed Iraq to quickly slip into chaotic, racially insecure conditions in much of the country.

The Religious Right tries to be careful of the sensibilities of literate people who like to imagine that they aren't totally intolerant. So they serve up stuff like this:

David Forte, a professor of law at Cleveland State University, also sees the agenda, but said it's an unconscious one, and we should be careful not to lump all liberals together as being pro-Islam.

Ignoring for a moment the leap from "radical Muslims" to "Islam," this recognition that some liberals may only be "unconscious" traitors to America is what passes for broad-mindedness in this corner of the Christian Right.

But it doesn't go very far, as the rest of the article illustrates:

Tim Graham of the Media Research Center said the agenda is obviously influencing liberal media.

"When you realize that the soldiers at Abu Ghraib like Charles Graner or Lindy England are household names compared to the people who've won the highest military honors in this war," Graham said, "you get an idea of the imbalance of scrutiny."

Superficially, we could say he has a point. I also think the mainstream media doesn't give nearly enough coverage to the individual stories of the soldiers who are fighting the Iraq War, as well as the one in Afghanistan.

But the two most publicized war heroes the last few years have been Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman. They have received widespread news coverage and a lot of praise. I would guess that in a poll, both those names would show as more familiar to Americans than Graner or England. But guess what? In both those cases, the Pentagon bald-faced lied about their situations in order to make them into what Pentagon marketers thought would be more attractive stories.

It's also a fact that Graner and England became notorious because they were photographed committing criminal acts of torture that damaged the image of the United States in the Muslim world about as badly as any other single incident has in recent years. We could always take the viewpoint of an authoritarian regime, though, and say with writers like this that it's all the fault of the Liberal we-don't-call-them-Jewish-in-public Media for reporting it.

In their most idealistic moments, Graham explained, liberals would say they're just trying to keep America responsible for actions against Islam.

If you live in a self-imposed cocoon, I guess this might seem like a description of reality. At least, the "postmodern" reality of the Republican Party.

"When you're only trying to hold America accountable and nobody else, you should not be surprised when a lot of people in America feel that you have a one-sided agenda," Graham said.

Since he doesn't give any specific examples or even mention what issues he's considering, I think we have to assume this comes straight out of his butt. He shouldn't be surprised that anyone not stoned on OxyContin doesn't take this nonsense seriously.

Forte noted that there are those in the media who have a strategy.

"There are those who are so inveterately anti-American that they become obsessive," Forte said. "Their whole life is a campaign against this country.["]

There are "those," he said. And he doesn't mean The Jews. Oh no, the Christian Rightists love Jews, don't you know? No, no, he didn't mean that it was The Jews who dedicate their whole lives to "campaign against this country." I'm sure he only meant the Insiders, or the Freemasons, or maybe the Illuminati who or "so inveterately anti-American."

This is one of the corners of the Christian Right. Darker than some others. We'll see what kind of light they shed on the current White House campaign to brand all war critics - and not just Jewish ones - as un-American.

Tags: anti-semitism, authoritarianism, christianism, militarism