On Friday morning, I posted a diary (which earned a front-page diary rescue), urging readers to demand that the House censure Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) for his remarks on the House floor Thursday night calling for the "arrest[], exile[] or hang[ing]" of those who speak out against the President’s Iraq policy, and (to add to the absurdity) imputed these views to Abraham Lincoln.
Like me, you might be tempted to shrug it off as yet another example of right-wing nuttiness, and to likewise note the paucity of media attention to the incident as yet another unsurprising example of the double-standard of the media
But I believe we need to steel ourselves against outrage fatigue and fight on this issue; and demand that the House Democratic Leadership take strong and decisive action to condemn Representative Young’s action: reprimand, censure, and up to and including – if he remains unrepentant – expulsion from the House. This is a fight we should not be running away from, for in a very real sense our democratic system of government is at stake.
Follow me on the flip.
First, some background (if you've been following this story, feel free to skip the next couple of paragraphs):
I. A Recap of Last Week’s Events
An update on Thursday night’s astonishing behavior on the floor of the House by Alaska Representative Don Young. (Crooks and Liars has the video, and the Congressional Record has the official text (page H1717, middle column, about halfway down).
You know as well as I that Abraham Lincoln, whom we honor on this President’s Day, said no such thing – that, indeed, the sentiments represented by these manufactured words are in profound opposition to everything that our Sixteenth President stood for. And you likely are already aware (but in any case will not be surprised) that the actual source of the slanderous manufactured quote was the right-wing Washington Times (which finally issued a correction on Saturday, after disappearing from its website on Friday the Frank Gaffney column built around the fraudulent quote which appeared in the print version of the Washington Times on Tuesday).
II. Roundup and Recap of Blogosphere Reaction
Here’s David Neiwert at Orcinus weighing in on the controversy on Saturday:
Everyone (but Atrios and Glenn Greenwald) seems to be missing the bigger issue here: Young not only repeated a phony Lincoln quote, he actually called for fellow members of Congress to be hung for dissenting on the war.
Neiwert also provides some background and context on Don Young:
Young has long been one of the most extreme members of Congress, with a notable anti-environmentalist record. He was a leader of of the same anti-endangered-species crowd that played a quiet role in helping to foment the formation of militias in the 1990s.
Indeed, Young was noteworthy back then for promoting "New World Order" conspiracy theories -- the metier of the militias -- including the claim that the United Nations was plotting to seize American lands in the name of environmental preservation. For that alone, Young was broadly celebrated among the militias, who often touted his "American Land Sovereignty Act" as a bulwark against NWO encroachment.
(For those unfamiliar with his work, Neiwert is a freelance journalist in the Pacific Northwest whose blog (and several nonfiction books) focus primarily on right-wing extremism; he recently concluded a ten-part series on the alarming rise of eliminationist rhetoric and sentiment among even the purportedly "respectable" right, of which Representative Young’s unhinged outburst on the House floor on Thursday night is but the latest example.)
Neiwert’s co-blogger at Orcinus, Sara Robinson, weighed in a bit later Saturday with her own post, including her own reaction to blogger Glenn Greenwald’s devastating on-air takedown of Frank Gaffney (the author of the (now disappeared) Washington Times piece on Tuesday which lead off with the fake Lincoln quote) on Alan Colmes radio show on Thursday night (Greenwald himself discusses it discusses it here, and you can listen to the interview yourself right here.
Several Daily Kos commenters have posted on the issue, including kovie, who posted this diary nearly in real-time immediately following Young’s outburst on the floor Thursday night; Gary Norton in this diary ("Don Young is a Saboteur, Should Be Exiled or Hanged") highlighting Rep. Young’s utter hypocrisy based on his voting record and prior speeches amid the U.S. peacekeeping efforts in the late 1990s in Kosovo; BarbinMD with this post entitled "Those Crazy Republicans"; and Vyan with a post yesterday entitled "They truly think we’re stupid".
Also weighing in were Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise, Scott Horton posting at Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin’s blog Balkinization, Mark Kleiman, and ThinkProgress.
Jeffrey Feldman, posting at his blog Frameshop and cross-posting here at Daily Kos, wrote yesterday on the troubling issues raised here, and identifies the reasons this is so important and why we ignore it at out own and our country’s peril:
What I see is a growing ease with which Republicans use the media to call for violence to be committed against Democrats. And as far as I can tell, they have been allowed to do this without any consequences whatsoever.
Are these calls for violence harmless? They are not. In fact, there is ample evidence to suggest that even the most poetic calls for violence by conservatives in the media put them on a path to violence--a path that starts with insults, leads to death threats, and then ultimately arrives at actual murder.
[snip]
In this atmosphere, we are left with a serious moral question: How seriously should we take these threats?
[snip]
From Greenwald's perspective, conservative media inventing historic quotes to justify accusations of treason against elected members of Congress is part of a broad "neoconservative mindset" that views the world through a lens of constant threats, fueling the need to endlessly start wars.
Again, I would argue that the implication is at once more simple than Greenwald allows and more dangerous.
<bold>What we are witnessing with these calls for violence is the radicalization of authoritarian conservatism as the prospects for electoral success diminish.</bold>
Feldman then quotes a letter from Timothy McVeigh to illustrate how such conservative "hyperbole" is taken literally – and acted on, to tragic effect – by right-wing extremists, finally concluding:
The violence frame, invoked with regularity and increasing boldness by leading voices of the Republican elite, should serve as a constant reminder that this latent authoritarianism has lashed out at our own from time to time in American culture. It has been a while since we have had a season of burning crosses, assassin's bullets, truck bombs, or clinic murders. But as new political alignments rise to the surface, I fear we may be heading for the rapids of domestic violence yet again.
In this respect, we must waste no time acknowledging that the authoritarian conservative violence frame is already far too prominent in the media and in government. We risk far too much by letting even one Congressman's call for violence go unanswered.
III. Where the H*ll is the Democratic Leadership on this?
Chris Bowers also had a great post at MyDD here. His title ("Hey Democrats—A Little Help?") makes clear that he shares my own frustration at the lack of traction this story has gotten over the last three days outside of the blogosphere:
While the cable news nets spent dozens of segments talking about the Edwards bloggers, and while hundreds of newpapers picked up one or more of the numerous wire reports written about that story, so far only two newspapers have picked up the story on Don Young. I don't watch the cable news nets, but I can't imagine there has been any coverage of this there, either. While one would think that a Congressman falsely making Abraham Lincoln appear like a bloodthirsty tyrant while simultaneously calling for the murder of a majority of the members of the house of Representatives is at least as big a news story as what two junior staffers for a presidential campaign wrote on their personal blog last year, clearly that is not the case. This story is just not making a dent in the news.
The main problem here is not just the media, however. In this circumstance, the main problem comes from Democrats who refuse to take the opportunity to pounce on these regularly insane statements from Republicans. There isn't a single Democrat in Congress who is bothering to speak up in outrage over Don Young's comments. With the exception of the Center for American Progress, I don't know any progressive advocacy organizations that are speaking up either. Basically, the entire Democratic establishment is just giving young a free pass on this. There are far more establishment Democrats who continue to attack bloggers over the Edwards flap than there are who are doing anything to attack Young. This is extremely frustrating, because in the end there is simply no way that the blogosphere can push this story into the media all by ourselves. The right-wing blogosphere can't push anything into national news without assistance from other conservative organizations, media and elected officials. The difference is that the right-wing blogosphere frequently gets that support from their establishment, while we get absolutely none from our establishment.
And then he makes a point which echoes a constant refrain about the Democratic Party’s failure to stand up for itself:
For a party whose main image problem is that we don't seem "tough," it is pathetic and self-fulfilling that the only people [our] "leaders" are willing to be tough on are ourselves. For crying out loud, take advantage of these moments when they come to you. Have some respect for yourselves. Don't let Republicans demand you apologize for year-old comments made by random junior staffers while their elected officials call for your murder on the floor of the House. Why would anyone respect a party that acts like that? How pitiful can we be, as we beg for mercy even after we took the majority in both House of Congress? If the Democratic Party doesn't learn to respect itself, and find that it is more important to denounce Republicans than it is to Sistah Souljah every single person in your own party, not only can we forget about winning the White House in 2008, but our time in power on Capitol Hill will be short lived indeed.
There are two separate elements at play: one is just basic political imcompetence, the inability to recognize a juicy hanging curveball and hit it out of the park. For not only were Don Young’s words on Thursday night odious and vile, but Mr. "Bridge to Nowhere" is not exactly the guy the Republicans want the public seeing in the news as the face of the Republican party. Setting aside the abstract political and moral imperative of taking a stand, on purely pragmatic political basis I can’t understand why the Democratic Party wouldn’t be salivating at the prospect of forcing this into the news by pushing for a vote of censure in the House.
But it strikes me that it's also an exemple of Josh Marshall’s "bitch-slap theory of politics" (a term he coined amid the original Swift-Boat attack on John Kerry in August, 2004) in practice once again. And the reality is, there’s a kernel of truth buried in the absurdity of how the dynamic plays out in real-time: if Congressional Democrats can’t or won’t stand up for themselves when their opponents are standing on the House floor literally calling for their execution, then why should we believe they’ll stand up - for us or for the constitution – when it would mean having to stand up for the truly powerless or when it really matters?
But then that’s really hardly surprising, is it? Last fall we watched as Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, decriminalizing torture and surrendering to the President – this President! – the legal ability to detain forever anyone the Executive declares to be an "unlawful enemy combatant," with barely a peep from the Democrats then still in the minority. At the time Arthur Silber had a very moving and sobering post entitled "Thus the World was Lost") discussing, among other things, collective responsibility and the moral position we as Americans now find ourselves in. It’s well worth a read in full, but there’s also a passage at the start that I believe is relevant today:
Barring extraordinary circumstances, we cannot be certain that a particular development represents a critical turning point at the time it occurs. If we dare to say, "This is the moment the battle was lost," only future events will prove whether we were correct. We do the best we can, based on our understanding of how similar events have unfolded in the past, and in light of our understanding of the underlying principles in play.
In some respects, if the Democratic Leadership does nothing to confront Representative Young’s anti-American rant on the House floor, it will be nothing new. As Neiwert and others have so ably catalogued, the right-wing airwaves have been awash in this kind of eliminationist crap for the last several years. But the fact is, I still believe in America, and that it is absolutely necessary to take a stand against the normalization of this sort of murderous, anti-American rhetoric on the very floor of the House.
But if I’m wrong, what does that mean? If there’s no one in the corridors of power willing to stand up for the principal that free and civil debate is at the very heart of our system of government, if those in power have abandoned Voltaire’s credo of "I disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right ot say it" -- then American representative democracy is already dead or beyond redemption. And if THAT’s the case, then isn’t it important for all of us to realize and acknowledge that fact, and to start behaving accordingly – whether it’s by arming ourselves of planning our getaway to Canada, New Zealand, or points beyond.
IV. So, what can we do?
But in the meantime, what are we to do? Again, I urge you to contact your representative if you have not done so already. Most are back in their Districts this week for the week-long President’s Day recess, so if you have the time and ability it may be possible to meet with them in person.
Also, contact the Democratic Leadership – the House Leadership as well as the DNC and ask them if they believe that calling for the execution of opponents of the President’s Iraq policy is acceptable behavior.
Contact the news media (the ombudsmen at the NYTimes and the Washington Post, as well as the news networks, and your local papers) and ask them why they haven’t deemed this story newsworthy.
Update: Thanks to AnotherMassachusettsLiberal for this handy email link to contact your Representative.
You can let the DNC know about your concerns on their website here
And contact the DCCC (the campaign arm of House Democrats) with your concerns here.
As for the esteemed guardians of our national discourse in the news media, here’s the website for New York Times Publc Editor Byron Calame (email him directly here, and Washington Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell website is here, and you can email her here or reach her by phone at 202-334-7582.
Look, I don’t know, maybe it’s a fools’ errand and there’s nothing we can do to force this into the public’s awareness. But I believe it is a moral imperative to try – nothing less than the survival of American representative democracy is at stake.