(Cross-posted at My Left Wing)
Okay, so it's great that Jean Rohe, a 22-year-old college senior, totally took down John "Slimy Chameleon" McCain in her college graduation speech and everything, but WTF? I mean, it shouldn't be news when someone speaks truth to power.
Let's face it:
Jeah Rohe should NOT be a hero.
It does not speak well for the state of our nation that whenever some punk-ass Republican arrogantly rides in on his high horse to what he believes will be a
fan club meeting, only to be brought up short by a U.S. citizen who
actually has the
stones to go face-to-face with said Republican and
tell the truth, it's a
Huge Freakin' Deal.
Let's run down what's happened in the past year:
- Cindy Sheehan presses the president for an answer to the simple and reasonable question, "For what noble cause did my son die?" and she makes headlines around the world.
- Reverend Joseph Lowery calls out the president's lies at Coretta Scott King's funeral, and you'da thunk he farted a juicy wet one during, well, during Coretta Scott King's funeral or something, given the way the right-wing media twisted its collective knickers into a wedgie of biblical proportions.
- Harry Taylor speaks his mind to the president during a town hall meeting and leaves those in attendance shocked, SHOCKED! that anyone would be so impertinent as to tell the president what they actually think about anything that matters.
- Ray McGovern holds Donald Rumsfeld accountable for the lies he told about WMD in Iraq, and he makes news for being a "heckler."
- Stephen Colbert turns the most powerful man in the world slowly and expertly on a spit, roasting and basting George Bush to perfection using nothing more elaborate than the truth and a rapier wit, and the left-wing blogosphere has a week-long orgasm.
Why should it be a Big Deal when those in power are held relentlessly and unflinchingly to account? The fact is, it shouldn't be. The continued existence of our democracy depends upon the consistent and insistent demanding of truth and accountability on the part of our public officials. What we have seen in the past year have been more and more instances of ordinary citizens who, given their One Big Chance to speak truth to power, have done so fearlessly - in essence, who have taken seriously their responsibility as citizens, and have seized their fleeting opportunities to do the only thing that seemed appropriate to them in those moments.
Unfortunately, what we have seen for the past five-and-a-half years has been the consistent, ongoing, breathtaking, disappointing and arguably treasonous abandonment of those responsibilities by those given the greatest opportunity to wield them. While most American citizens will be lucky ever to have One Big Chance to speak truth to power, there are two groups in America who, given that opportunity virtually every single day, have squandered it almost without exception.
Those groups are Congress, and The Press.
Every day on the floor of the House and Senate, Democratic congresspeople have the opportunity to address head-on the lies, evasion, stonewalling, corruption, callousness, cruelty, hypocrisy, moral turpitude, incompetence, pandering, treason, and abrogation of duty of the Republicans in power in this country for the past five years. Every day on the front pages of this nation's papers, during the broadcast of this nation's news shows, on the covers of this nation's magazines, the press has the opportunity to print the truth, to hold a mirror up to the actions of the Republicans in power in this country for the past five years, to share with the American people what they know about the malfeasance of those to whom we pay our tax dollars.
And yet - both of these groups have -
-- over and over and over and over again --
chosen to abandon their responsibilities, to give up their duties as citizens of a democracy, in favor of convenience, or money, or approval, or some other compensating mechanism to make up for that lack of self-esteem they exacerbate daily by Selling Out instead of Doing What's Right.
BUT -
perhaps I am being too quick to judge here. Perhaps it is not lack of moral fibre that prevents these two pillars of our democracy from doing what the better angels of their nature tell them they should be doing. Perhaps it is simpler than that. Perhaps they simply do not Know The Way; perhaps they do not know what it means to Speak Truth To Power.
I am willing to concede that. With that possibility in mind, here is a brief primer for those eager but untutored members of Congress and The Press on what a show of real cojones looks like:
First there was Cindy Sheehan, who parked herself in George Bush's front yard demanding an answer to a simple question: For what "noble cause" did my son die? She would not go away, she refused to take no answer for an answer, and she became an embarrassment to the most powerful man in the world as the rest of the world was reminded of how clearing brush and staying (mostly) upright on a bicycle for the better part of a summer is the greatest challenge the current American president is capable of handling; he did not even have the balls to roll down the bulletproof, blacked-out window of his limousine as his motorcade entourage thundered sheepishly by the ditch in which Cindy and her supporters were encamped. So even though technically she didn't get her One Big Chance to face down the president, Cindy Sheehan worked hard to create it - and she got her answer by his default.
.
Reverend Joseph Lowery took advantage of his One Big Chance with the President at the funeral celebration for Coretta Scott King:
"We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there," Lowery said during the service as Bush listened, sitting only a few feet away. "Coretta knew and we knew that there are weapons of misdirection right down here."
.
Then there was Harry Taylor, whose One Big Chance came in his Norman Rockwell/Jimmy Stewart moment, when he stood up and shocked the world, saying to George W. Bush:
You never stop talking about freedom, and I appreciate that. But while I listen to you talk about freedom, I see you assert your right to tap my telephone, to arrest me and hold me without charges, to try to preclude me from breathing clean air and drinking clean water and eating safe food. If I were a woman, you'd like to restrict my opportunity to make a choice and decision about whether I can abort a pregnancy on my own behalf. [snip]
Okay, I don't have a question. What I wanted to say to you is that I -- in my lifetime, I have never felt more ashamed of, nor more frightened by my leadership in Washington, including the presidency, by the Senate [snip]
And I would hope -- I feel like despite your rhetoric, that compassion and common sense have been left far behind during your administration, and I would hope from time to time that you have the humility and the grace to be ashamed of yourself inside yourself. And I also want to say I really appreciate the courtesy of allowing me to speak what I'm saying to you right now. That is part of what this country is about.
.
Then, during his One Big Chance, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern called out Donald Rumsfeld about Rumsfeld's lies regarding WMDs in Iraq:
McGovern: You said you knew where they were.
Rumsfeld: I did not. I said I knew where suspect sites were and...
McGovern: You said you knew where they were. Tikrit, Baghdad, northeast, south, west of there. Those are your words.
.
And, of course, there was
Stephen Colbert, who stood a few feet from the most powerful man in the world, looked him square in the eye, held his gaze, and
said without flinching:
Sir, pay no attention to the people who say the glass is half empty, because 32% means it's two-thirds empty. There's still some liquid in that glass is my point, but I wouldn't drink it. The last third is usually backwash.
.
Finally, our heroine of the moment, Jean Rohe. Her One Big Chance came at the last moment, when she realized that Senator John McCain's appearance at her college graduation was in reality a campaign stop, and she decided that Truth needed to make an appearance at what otherwise would have been a crap avalanche of Power:
The senator does not reflect the ideals upon which this university was founded . . . Senator Mc Cain will tell us today that dissent and disagreement are our "civic and moral obligation" in times of crisis. I consider this a time of crisis and I feel obligated to speak . . . although I don't profess to possess the wisdom that time affords us, I do know that preemptive war is dangerous and wrong, that George Bush's agenda in Iraq is not worth the many lives lost. And I know that despite all the havoc that my country has wrought overseas in my name, Osama bin Laden still has not been found, nor have those weapons of mass destruction. [snip]
We have nothing to fear from people who are different from us, from people who live in other countries, even from the people who run our government--and this we should have learned from our educations here. We can speak truth to power, we can allow our humanity always to come before our nationality, we can refuse to let fear invade our lives and to goad us on to destroy the lives of others.
Here endeth the lesson. Any questions?
It's long past time when calling to account this obscenely corrupt, dishonest, incompetent, thieving, morally reprehensible cabal of Republicans should be a "Man Bites Dog" story. It's time that our civic heroes, rather than only appearing randomly at unpredictable intervals in unexpected places, should be appearing regularly where we have a right to expect them:
In our houses of Congress, and
on our front pages and television screens.