Obama vs. the 'Outside Agitators'
Readers may have noticed that, during the past seven or eight months, the tradition of honorable dissent in American political life seems to have become dishonorable.
Disagreement with the administration is no longer the Higher Patriotism but the Lower Patriotism--a form of opportunism dressed up as hypocrisy. Indeed, criticism of the president is no longer a healthy symptom of democracy but an irresponsible (some would argue treasonous) act of political sedition. Right-thinking people agree: We have only one president at a time, and his success is the country's success; his failure is the fault of embittered partisans.
If readers detect a smidgen of cynicism in THE SCRAPBOOK's attitude here, there's good reason. This sea change in principles seems to have coincided with the election and inauguration of Barack Obama as president. Whereas it was once lively and brave and culturally imperative to depict George W. Bush as Hitler, complete with swastikas and squared-off moustache, or cast aspersions on the character, intelligence, morals, and family life of Bush or Dick Cheney or Karl Rove, it appears to be something approaching a hate crime to depict President Obama in anything less than hagiographical mode.
Which is why THE SCRAPBOOK is enjoying itself so much these days. As the various Obama initiatives--socialized medicine, "stimulus" spending, cap-and-trade--grow less and less popular with the voting populace, yesterday's bulging-vein, red-in-the-face Bush-haters are discovering that public discontent manifests itself today in old-fashioned, tried-and-true, rough-and-tumble methods: booing congressmen at town meetings and shouting down weaselly answers, holding up signs in front of television cameras, marching in protest--even criticizing President Obama on the Internet!
And yet, instead of celebrating these tributes to the dissenting spirit of the antiwar movement of the 1960s or acts of civil disobedience for civil rights, the left has chosen to react like Uncle Harry when his son came home from college wearing a beard. Here is the communications director of the Democratic National Committee, Brad Woodhouse:
Republicans . . . are inciting angry mobs of a small number of rabid right wing extremists funded by K Street lobbyists to disrupt thoughtful discussions about the future of health care in America.
And here is the Washington Post's designated socialist op-ed columnist, Harold Meyerson:
[R]ight-wing Republicans stormed a number of . . . meetings across the country, shouting down members of the House and, in Philadelphia, Sen. Arlen Specter and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. In Austin, protesters blocked Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett's car and made it impossible for him to talk to constituents about such matters as appointments to military academies.
Sounds more like Aunt Harriet than Red Harold. Yes, not only did "rabid" protestors "shout down" Sen. Arlen Specter, and "disrupt thoughtful discussions about the future of health care," they were following the orders of unnamed "K Street lobbyists" and other outside agitators, and preventing Lloyd Doggett from talking about West Point! Somehow, Obama's supporters--you might call them the silent majority--just aren't able to cut through all the noise.
Readers may ask, where have we heard this before? Well, turn the clock back a few revolutions, and the voice of Richard M. Nixon may be heard, complaining about the decibel level of protestors and pleading for a national conversation.
In these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading. We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another--until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.
That, of course, was from Nixon's first Inaugural Address (1969)--and if we may say so, the communications director of the Democratic National Committee, Brad Woodhouse, couldn't have said it better.
Appeasing North Korea
THE SCRAPBOOK is not a reflexive partisan. We were appalled to see Bill Clinton in Pyongyang last week making a deal of some sort for the release of the two American hostages being held by the North Korean regime. But appeasement of the Kim family dictatorship has, sadly, been U.S. policy through several administrations now. We were equally appalled when the Bush administration's point man on Korea, Ambassador Christopher Hill, reacted to criticism of North Korea's abominable human rights violations with this jaw-dropping bit of moral equivalency: "Each country, including our own, needs to improve its human rights record."
Frankly, what our own country really needs to improve is its diplomatic backbone. Our contributing editor Max Boot made the point well at Commentary magazine's Contentions blog:
"In 1847, David Pacifico, a Jew who had been born in British-held Gibraltar and was therefore a British subject, had his house burned down in Athens by an anti-Semitic mob. The Greek government refused to protect him or provide any restitution. Lord Palmerston, Britain's foreign secretary, sent the Royal Navy to blockade Greece until it paid Pacifico's demands.
"Critics charged that Palmerston was overreacting. The House of Lords even voted to censure him. But in the House of Commons, Palmerston carried the day with a magnificent five-hour oration in which he declared: 'As the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say, Civis Romanus sum [I am a Roman citizen], so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him from injustice and wrong.'
"Theodore Roosevelt struck a similar tone in 1904 after Ion Perdicaris, a Greek-American living in Morocco, was kidnapped by the bandit chief Ahmed al-Raisuli. His Secretary of State John Hay drove the 1904 Republican Convention into a frenzy of approbation when he made it known that an American naval squadron had been sent to Morocco to demand 'Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead.' (It later turned out that Perdicaris was no longer an American citizen, but that was a mere detail compared to the principle Roosevelt espoused.)
"I recount these tidbits of ancient history to show how far we have come over the past century--in the wrong direction. Today the United States is the mightiest nation in the world--far stronger than Britain was in its 19th-century heyday or than we ourselves were in 1904. Yet what happens today to those who dare take our citizens hostage? Umm, pretty much nothing. . . .
"Granted, there are good reasons not to launch a war against North Korea or Iran [now holding three U.S. backpackers hostage]. North Korea, after all, has something that the Moroccans and Greeks didn't--nuclear weapons. Still, it's an outrage that there isn't more outrage, either in the U.S. government or the country at large, over the fate of our fellow citizens who are held hostage by thugs. We could use a ' Civis Americanus sum' doctrine today."