Treason-baiting and Republican projection

Joe McCarthy, another political saint high in the pantheon of today's Republican Party

Dave Neiwert, one of the leading journalistic experts in the far-right and on how its messages become mainstreamed into the Republican Party, writes in Identifying the enemy at his Orcinus blog on 09/11/07:

Everywhere you turn, it seems, Republicans are repeating what's clearly going to be their main theme for the 2008 election: Democrats are traitors. They want us to lose in Iraq because they hate Bush so much they're willing to let the terrorists win. Next thing you know, Al Qaeda's gonna be blowing up the Peoria mall.

For understandable if regrettable reasons, Democrats have been reluctant to proceed on the assumption that the Republican Party has become an authoritarian organization that no longer considers itself legitimately constrained by the law or the Constitution, much less long-established political conventions.

This is not the same as saying that the Republicans are able to operate completely outside the Constitution and the law. But it does mean that they are willing to do so. And they have succeeded to a stunning extent in areas like launching a preventive war in Iraq, implementing an illegal and sadistic torture program whose only real purpose is to spread terror among the target populations, Executive secrecy, massive warrantless spying, blatant defiance of Congress, the outing of Valerie Plame. The full list would be much longer.

But they are going to have to face the fact that such treason-baiting in very likely to be a main part of the Republicans' political strategy all the way through the 2008 elections and beyond. And we all need to understand what a damned ugly strategy it is.

Neiwert has often pointed out that one characteristic of today's Republican Party is a remarkable degree of projection. Ordinary hypocrisy is presumably as old as politics itself. But it has become striking that when Republican spokesmen official and unofficial accuse the Democrats of indulging in some kind of particularly unworthy political tactic, it's very likely that the Republicans themselves are intending to indulge in that very tactic in a massive way.

The Republicans in the "Pet Crock" hearings (Petraeus and Crocker) this week almost to a person indulged in theatrics about how much they were shocked! shocked! that MoveOn.org had questioned the absolute integrity and all-round wonderfulness of our Saviour-General Petraeus in an ad in the New York Times. Wonky Muse gives an able summary of the controversy and its political context in this post.

The Reps focused their partisan outrage in particular on the ad's play on the Saviour-General's name: General Petraeus or General Betray Us?. An image and PDF file of the ad is available at the linked MoveOn.org site, along with there own defense of the ad, which continues in Our ad on General Petraeus.

Here I want to talk about this particular instance of projection. So first, this is the entire body of the MoveOn.org's text:

General Petraeus is a military man constantly at war with the facts. In 2004, just before the election, he said there was "tangible progress" in Iraq and that "Iraqi leaders are stepping forward." And last week Petraeus, the architect of the escalation of troops in Iraq, said, “We say we have achieved progress, and we are obviously going to do everything we can to build on that progress.”

Every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed. Yet the General claims a reduction in violence. That’s because, according to the New York Times, the Pentagon has adopted a bizarre formula for keeping tabs on violence. For example, deaths by car bombs don’t count. The Washington Post reported that assassinations only count if you’re shot in the back of the head — not the front. According to the Associated Press, there have been more civilian deaths and more American soldier deaths in the past three months than in any other summer we’ve been there. We’ll hear of neighborhoods where violence has decreased. But we won’t hear that those neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed.

Most importantly, General Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows: Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war. We may hear of a plan to withdraw a few thousand American troops. But we won’t hear what Americans are desperate to hear: a timetable for withdrawing all our troops. General Petraeus has actually said American troops will need to stay in Iraq for as long as ten years.

Today, before Congress and before the American people, General Petraeus is likely to become General Betray Us.

You can check MoveOn.org's own links above for their defense of their ad.

Here's my basic take on this flap. To repeat what Wonky Muse said in my own way, I wouldn't have picked that "betray us" theme around which to organize the ad. But I'm not going to be mealy-mouthed about this. I not going to criticize them for it or claim that it was inappropriate.

And in the marketing world in general, an advertisement that people think is obnoxious can be very effective in its purpose if it generates "buzz". And since virtually every Republican Member of Congress I heard this week at the hearings either mentioned the ad specifically or alluded to it, anyone who listened to that or read the news reports about it heard that some people thought there was real reason to question the Saviour-General's credibility.

My own guidelines in looking at things like this would be roughly as follows:

• Though the Republican Party has lately been re-defining words like "torture" to mean what they want them to mean at the moment, anyone not afflicted with RepSpeak can clearly distinguish the difference between the concept of "betraying trust" and "committing treason by giving aid and comfort to an enemy of the United States". This isn't comma-dancing, it's plain American English. The "aid and comfort" phrase is a well-known part of the US Constitution defining treason.

• Accusations of treason (aid and comfort to an enemy) should never be used lightly in politics. That's one reason the Constitution defines a very high bar on legal charges of treason, to discourage that very thing.

• Accusing the other party or the opposing candidate of "betraying" the public trust is common as dirt. See below for a dramatic instance.

• Despite the fact that accusations of "treason" are all-too-often used carelessly, there have been real cases of treason in American history, from Benedict Arnold to the officials responsible for blowing Valerie Plame's CIA cover for the cheapest of political purposes. Unionists and Jacksonians often referred to advocates of secession prior to the Civil War as "traitors", and in many cases the usage was entirely legitimate. When real acts of treason are occurring, there's nothing wrong with calling it by its real name.

• Democratic speakers and writers have not often called it "McCarthyism", and maybe that word has become as overused as "the example of Munich" to the point it doesn't actually mean much to most readers and listeners. But pretty much since September 12, 2001, Republicans from Anne Coulter and Rush Limbaugh to John Ashcroft and George Bush have frequently accused war critics and Democratic opponents of the aid-and-comfort type of treason. It's sleazy as all hell But they've been doing it and they're going to keep on doing it.

• As Robert Scheer says in the quote we highlighted this week at The Blue Voice, "So, ambassadors and generals lie. Get used to it." Pretending that generals are somehow holy men beyond question is not "supporting the troops" or "respecting the military": it sticking your head into a part of your body that doesn't admit light.

• To paraphrase Scheer, I would also say, Republicans and their media flacks are going to call Democrats traitors and weak on defense no matter what. Get used to it. But don't ignore it. It's how today's Republican Party acts.

• Given that reality, unilateral rhetorical disarmament by Democrats and war critics is not advisable. That doesn't mean we have to be stupid or sleazy about it. But war critics who think being nicey-nice is going to stop the Republicans from slinging sleaze should probably stop trying to criticize the war. But the Reps are going to try to stigmatize anything and everything you say that departs from the Cheney-Bush line or (for the moment) that sounds even mildly critical of our Saviour-General Petreaus.

Back in February of 2004, elected President Al Gore said the following of sitting President George W. Bush before a group of Tennessee Democrats:

He betrayed this country! He played on our fears. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure dangerous to our troops, an adventure preordained and planned before 9/11 ever took place.

I didn't criticize Gore for this at the time; on the contrary, I highlighted it on my blog. Despite my expectations at the time, Gore's statement didn't seem to create a whole lot of rending of clothing and gnashing of teeth by our Patriotically Correct Republicans. Presumably that's because it was very clear in the context that he was referring to a betrayal of trust.

But Gore also knows, I'm very sure, that tricking your own country into an unnecessary war acting with malicious motives can be and has been considered an act of treason in the other sense, as well. Again, in the context, it was clear he was referring to a betrayal of trust. But still, Gore's 2004 declaration that Bush "betrayed this country" was a stronger statement than MoveOn.org's "Petraeus/Betray Us" wordplay.

Getting back to the projection phenomenon, the Republicans' strong emphasis on how supposedly reprehensible it was for MoveOn.org to suggest that the Saviour-General would "betray us" even in the sense of betraying the public trust - and again, that's clearly what the ad means - is a very strong indication that the Republicans' treason-baiting against the Democrats and war critics is only going to intensify.

In Ted Olson and the pushovers 09/12/07, Neiwert explains how the Establishment media facilities this ugly strategy:

Why is it that foulmouthed left-wing bloggers seem to be the only people who have noticed that there's a peculiar set of political rules ruling the Beltway, particularly within media circles, these days?

Here's what we've noticed: For some reason, Democrats must be the model of decorum and civility and moderation and bipartisanship when it comes to governing; any deviance from this script brings on fainting spells and finger-wagging. Meanwhile Republicans can be as vicious and nasty and ruthless and nakedly partisan as they please, and their "toughness" is merely celebrated.

Jane Hamsher in In Defense of MoveOn - No More Arrows in the Back Huffington Post 09/13/07 argues against head-ducking and timidity in the face of this kind of phony theatrical outrage by the Republican defenders of Scooter Libby and Karl Rove outing Valerie Plame. Specifically, she raps the titular head of the Democratic Party, John Kerry, on the knuckles for doing a duck-and-cover routine on this one:

I'm sorry, John Kerry, but you don't help the right wing out. Ever. Now they've got Diaper Dave Vitter out there leading the battle cry, trying to reclaim himself by introducing resolutions to denounce MoveOn. Does Kerry really not know how it works at this point?

Dave Neiwert in the Ted Olson post linked above characterized the Democratic response to the Republicans histrionics over the MoveOn.org ad as having been "to cower and run from their own best advocates." And he continues:

These, then, are the Bush Rules in action: Only Democrats have to be civil. "Bipartisanship" means acceding to the conservative agenda. And Republicans can be as vicious as they like, because then we'll just call it "toughness" or, if it's really ugly, "just a joke."

You'd think by now that Democrats would have figured out they're being played for patsies, that the calls for "civility" are just an obfuscatory demand for capitulation and a cover for the right to indulge in the lowest and meanest kind of discourse. But judging from the past week's events, it's clear they haven't.

Here are links to a couple of articles to which Wonky Muse's post referred where the Republican projection strategy is on display:

MoveOn's McCarthy moment by Peter Feaver Boston Globe 09/11/07

MoveOn and McCarthy New York Sun editorial 09/13/07

Tags: al gore, antiwar movement, iraq war, moveon.org, petraeus, treason-baiting