The GOP has decided to play the treason card. Desparate to silence the searing criticism being leveled by Kerry and Edwards castigating their disasterous pursuit of NeoCon goals in Iraq, BushCo now seeks to equate this dissent with disloyalty. As Dana Milbank puts it in today's WaPo, this tactic
"Tests the Limits" of legitimate campaigning.
President Bush and leading Republicans are increasingly charging that Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry and others in his party are giving comfort to terrorists and undermining the war in Iraq -- a line of attack that tests the conventional bounds of political rhetoric.
Appearing in the Rose Garden yesterday with Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, Bush said Kerry's statements about Iraq "can embolden an enemy." After Kerry criticized Allawi's speech to Congress, Vice President Cheney tore into the Democratic nominee, calling him "destructive" to the effort in Iraq and the struggle against terrorism.
So, how might some of the most revered GOP icons in history have reacted to such charges? Read on -->
Milbank notes that the treason accusations now being made by BushCo
have been a component of American politics since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and surfaced in the modern era during the McCarthy communist hunt and the Vietnam War protests.
Indeed, suppression of dissent by such means has been utilized by tyrants throughout history. Herman Goering, Nazi Luftwaffe Chief, put it candidly during the Nuremberg trials:
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.
In the past though, true patriots have refused to let such rhetoric silence their dissent.
On Jan. 12, 1848, while the Mexican-American War raged on, a 38-year-old Illinois congressman introduced a measure that would censure former President James K. Polk. During a lengthy speech, that young member of the Illinois House of Representatives called into question Polk's justification for war with Mexico -- a war which was, in the words of the speaker, "unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced."
The congressman said Polk would have "gone farther with his proof, if it had not been for the small matter, that the truth would not permit him" and noted that the war was "from beginning to end, the sheerest deception." The congressman exclaimed, "Let him answer fully, fairly and candidly. Let him answer with facts and not with arguments." More importantly, "Let him attempt no evasion, no equivocation."
The Congressman? Why, Abraham Lincoln, of course, whom our present Clueless Leader has idolized as the best president in U.S. history. Lincoln, in criticizing the war
realized that he had to distinguish between the role of the military and the policies of President Polk. The army had done its work admirably, Congressman Lincoln noted, but the president had "bungled" his. Polk, he feared, was "a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man. God grant he may be able to show there is not something about his conscience more painful than all his mental perplexity."
Lincolon was the first of many Republicans to embrace the vital democratic right of dissent, even during wartime.
In 1918, ex-President Roosevelt challenged Woodrow Wilson's sweeping crackdown against dissent after the American entry into World War I. "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong," Roosevelt said, "is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
Even after Pearl Harbor, when Americans rallied to the support of their country, Republican stalwart Senator Robert Taft emphasized:
Too many people desire to suppress criticism simply because they think it will give some comfort to the enemy...If that comfort makes the enemy feel better for a few moments, they are welcome to it...because the maintenance of the right to criticism in the long run will do the country maintaining it a great deal more good than it will do the enemy.
What would Lincoln, or Roosevelt, or Taft say to the present pretenders to the White House who are using tactics that are "morally treasonable to the American public"?
And what would BushCo say to those GOP forebearers who criticized their war Presidents? Would they dare call them treasonous?
We need to shout out that for BushCo to sink to this level of rhetoric puts them in the company of history's worst tyrants and defiles the legacy of patriotic Americans of both parties who have fought and died for the right of free speech, even speech questioning the policies and judgment of a President at war.
Update [2004-9-25 2:36:41 by Sabarte]: - Patagonia's diary notes that the NYT has an editorial up for Saturday slamming BushCo for this tactic:
President Bush and his surrogates are taking their re-election campaign into dangerous territory. Mr. Bush is running as the man best equipped to keep America safe from terrorists - that was to be expected. We did not, however, anticipate that those on the Bush team would dare to argue that a vote for John Kerry would be a vote for Al Qaeda. Yet that is the message they are delivering - with a repetition that makes it clear this is an organized effort to paint the Democratic candidate as a friend to terrorists.
When Vice President Dick Cheney declared that electing Mr. Kerry would create a danger "that we'll get hit again," his supporters attributed that appalling language to a rhetorical slip. But Mr. Cheney is still delivering that message. Meanwhile, as Dana Milbank detailed so chillingly in The Washington Post yesterday, the House speaker, Dennis Hastert, said recently on television that Al Qaeda would do better under a Kerry presidency, and Senator Orrin Hatch, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has announced that the terrorists are going to do everything they can between now and November "to try and elect Kerry."
This is despicable politics. It's not just polarizing - it also undermines the efforts of the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency to combat terrorists in America. Every time a member of the Bush administration suggests that Islamic extremists want to stage an attack before the election to sway the results in November, it causes patriotic Americans who do not intend to vote for the president to wonder whether the entire antiterrorism effort has been kidnapped and turned into part of the Bush re-election campaign. The people running the government clearly regard keeping Mr. Bush in office as more important than maintaining a united front on the most important threat to the nation.