Right wing lies need to be confronted.
Right wing liars say people who are against the war in Iraq are weak on terrorism.
This is a lie, which is to say (1) it is an assertion that cannot stand when scrutinized against reality, and (2) the people who say it do not care that it is not true, the statement is not asserted for its ‘truth-value’, as the philosophers say, but for its political value. (Continually confronting the lie is one strategy for undermining that value.)
Here is some reality that the right-side liars must continually deny to propogate their lie:
The war in Iraq is not the same thing as the fight against terrorism.
The war in Iraq is a war of aggression trumped-up by fear-inducing distortions asserting we faced a serious, imminent threat from “weapons of mass destruction.” (This is just indisputable.)
The fight against terrorism, as thoughtful, non-militarists see it, is the project of eliminating terrorist attacks in the short term by finding out about plots in advance and stopping them, and in the long term by defusing the kinds of views that lead people to conduct terrorist attacks.
Reiteration: It is a ludicrous, reality-denying LIE to say or imply Democrats or “liberals” or self-identified progressives are against stopping terrorism.
Opposing the way Bush purports to stop terrorism does not mean one is against stopping terrorism. To say or imply otherwise is a LIE.
There are different strategies for trying to stop terrorism. It just so happens that Bush-Cheney-GOP strategy is terrible. Bush’s strategy is to start overseas wars and turn America into a police state where the central government is secretive, all-powerful, and above the law.
Those who oppose Bush’s strategy want to stop terrorism at least as much as Bush does, but we prefer to do it in ways that do not result in an endless war and an authoritarian society. To say or imply opposing Bush’s strategy for stopping terrorism is being pro-terrorist or helpful to terrorists, as the right-siders incessantly do, is a despicable LIE whose only purpose can be to bully people into accepting the Bush-Cheney-GOP’s terrible policy.
[Serious question: what kind of government must rule through bullying and lies, seeking acquiescence to a secretive central government with unlimited and unchallengeable power and immunity from the law? These are truly dark days. I think this is indisputable.]
Contrary to the Bush-Cheney-GOP distortion of reality, we of the left side seek to stop terrorism without giving up basic moral-political principles based on our Judeo-Christian/Enlightenment history. Thus we are confident that competent, well-supported government officials can find out about terrorist plots and stop them without breaking the law and violating the Constitution; that they can do so without torturing people and using secret prisons; and without starting aggressive, destructive wars to impose our will on others. And we believe that despite the possibility of new deadly attacks in the US and elsewhere, we must meet those situations and defeat the threat without cowering in fear. To repeat: we left-siders believe terrorism can be stopped without giving up basic Western moral principles and without breaking international and domestic law. It is in this way we oppose the Bush-Cheney-GOP strategy to stop terrorism – it is immoral and unlawful. As long as Bush-Cheney-GOP responds to the threat of terrorism by abandoning moral principle and acting outside the law, the terrorists are winning, America is being destroyed from the inside.
(Note to right-side apologists regarding the burden of proof: you’re the ones who crossed this moral-historical line, following the lead of people you purport to despise, and therefore you have to justify it; you have to prove the need to act outside our laws and general moral principles (torture is immoral) to stop terrorism. If you can’t meet this burden of proof and still assert the need to act immorally to stop terrorism, you have failed our society and you should step aside with a certain degree of shame and let people who want to stop terrorism within our law and morality, without becomging the authoritarian society we despise, have a chance.)
Democrats and liberals and progressives want to stop terrorism as much or more than the Bush-Cheney-GOP does (the latter sure have benefitted politically from terrorism, haven’t they?), we just want to do it in a good, smart way. Rejecting Bush’s immoral, authoritarian strategy of stopping terrorism in favor of more considered, lawful, long-term strategies does not mean one is weak on terrorism. To say or imply otherwise is a lie.
There may in fact be some tiny percentage of right wing and/or left wing radical revolutionaries who are happy about terrorist attacks, happy to have social chaos, although as a person who pays a lot of attention to news, I haven’t heard about them. It’s true I haven’t gone digging to find it, but that’s the point. If such views do exist they are the views of tiny fringes. The Republican assertion that that view characterizes the Democratic Party or “liberals” or self-identified progressives is a lie. The Republican need to make people believe that lie is the “news” that would blow open the whole Bush-Cheney-GOP misrule of America. They can’t run on facts; they can’t legitimately rule based on reality, so they rule illegitimately by distorting reality with lies. That’s the news!
Republican lies are an important part of the problems undermining democracy and keeping our country on Bush’s dim-witted, ultimately self-destructive course of “shoot first, ask questions never.” An ultimately inseparable part of these problems is the tendency of the major news media to report Republican lies uncritically, without any kind of reality-based scrutiny that would in many cases reveal the Republicans are lying. A lot has been written about this issue, of course, and I wish I had time to read all those analyses. My sense is that the media problem is rooted in the decades-long hounding of the media by the right asserting that any reality-based scrutiny of rightwing positions is “liberal bias.” Unfortunately, as a whole, the media did not respond to this challenge as serious journalists would, by assiduously subjecting every party’s assertions, including this right-side media smear, to even more rigorous reality-based scrutiny. Serious journalists would in that way force the rightwingers to stop lying or explicitly deny reality. The journalists we have generally capitulated to the distortions, or at least the ability to distort without scrutiny. To avoid being smeared as biased, big media journalists will now generally report what the right-siders say without the larger contexts of reality and history. The general acceptance by the media of the “liberal bias” smear is probably due in part to the big corporate consolidation of the media and the related conversion of news into profit-aiming infotainment and ideological-identity politics, and probably in part to the desire of media professionals as a class to be “insiders,” close to the people in power. Whatever the cause, we now have a mainstream media unwilling or unable to scrutinize the assertions of the powerful against reality; lies by those with power are generally not questioned, certainly not in a persistent, focused way that would squarely raise the issue of our governance by lies. Because of the mainstream media’s privileged place in the public/political sphere, its capitulation to GOP distortions has the effect of disengaging politics and public discourse from reality and engendering a Foucauldian nightmare in which the powerful rule by semantic fiat – what they say is is; what they say isn’t isn’t. And anyone who disagrees is weak on terror!
That is the big Bush lie of ’06. It is practically inevitable that the Bush-Cheney-GOP empire of lies will come crashing down eventually. The big questions (or some of them) are how fast it will happen, whether the well-intentioned can keep the collapse of the rightists from dragging the country into chaos, and whether the institution we call the mainstream media will have a place in our reconstructed polity or will go down along with the evil empire it facilitated.