Pure democracy

The Wing Nut Right’s unique brand of head-held-high stupidity was on display last week, and it deserves proper tribute.


First there was U.S. Rep. Michele Bachman, R-Minn., who offered this ominous X-Files take on swine flu:

"I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter. And I'm not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it's an interesting coincidence."

There are too many nuggets of stupidity packed into this one short comment to just let it fly by; it needs to be parsed, like a line of Frost, to be fully appreciated.

First, there’s the “Democrat (sic) president” bit. It really is adorable how a few righties of the lowest uncommon denominator still do that smirky little thing of using “democrat” (usually with a small “d” if they can write at all) as an adjective. It’s like listening to little kids call each other “doodoo heads.”

Then there’s the part about not blaming Obama, which of course she was, which of course is why she brought it up in the first place.

Finally – and OK, this is nitpicking – the last outbreak of swine flu was in 1976, when Gerald Ford was president. Oops.

Not to be outdone in Red State moronics by a Yankee, Kim Hendren, a state senator from Gravette, Ark., enlightened a meeting of the Pulaski County Republican Committee last week by referring to U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., as “that Jew.”

Hendren apologized to Schumer, and then finished the job of making everything right with this disclaimer in the Arkansas News: “I don’t have any issue with Jews or Jewish people or whatever the politically correct term they wish to be identified as.”

Oh . . . OK. So this isn’t about Hendren being a bigoted nitwit. It’s about the tyranny of political correctness.

Actually, pols of this caliber should be saluted, not scorned.

These people are, quite obviously, complete cretins. As they could be elected to public office only by other complete cretins, their strict adherence to the code of complete cretinhood is true constituent service. This is representative government in its purest form.

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Yes, we still have free speech, so shut up about it

In 1999, when then-Braves pitcher John Rocker spewed a bunch of sociological barf onto the pages of Sports Illustrated, I wrote either a column or an editorial – I honestly can’t remember which and don’t feel like looking it up – saying in effect that Rocker was an idiot.

The ink was hardly dry on it when I got a letter from a longtime family acquaintance, a career radio man, scolding me for trying to deny Mr. Rocker his First Amendment rights, and adding something to the effect that a journalist, of all people, ought to be ashamed for not respecting the very constitutional franchise that protects my profession.

I didn’t respond. If I had, I would have told him I wasn’t denying Rocker his First Amendment rights (as if it would ever be in my power to do such a thing) – I was exercising my own. And that frankly, it was kind of pathetic for a broadcaster, of all people, not to know the difference.

But that reaction to my criticism of Rocker 10 years ago seems almost to have become the norm: Speak out in disagreement with somebody else’s speaking out, and suddenly you’re a wannabe censor. It’s patently inane, and flies in the face of logic comprehensible to a reasonably bright 4-year-old, but there it is.

In a recent column that begins “Checked on your freedom of speech lately?” Great American Bill O’Reilly weighs in on the “persecution” of Miss California Carrie Prejean, the Miss USA runner-up who got lots of people’s undies in a wad by saying she didn’t approve of gay marriage. (In BillWorld, other people are criticized or disagreed with; conservatives are “persecuted.” It seems if you’re on the right, Nero or Caligula lurks behind every door.)

But this isn’t about O’Reilly; he is what he is, and you know going in what gallery he’s playing to. And I really thought the outcry against what she said – which, like it or not (and I don’t), still represents a majority view in this culture – was overblown and silly. (It did, however, land Prejean a temporary gig as a host on Foxymoron News, just in case this whole thing hadn’t yet gotten stupid enough.)

It’s about what free speech is, and what it isn’t. It isn’t a protection against employers or sponsors or beauty pageant officials taking issue with something you said, and severing their ties with you as a consequence. And it sure as hell isn’t a protection against people responding to a public utterance by calling you – or me – an idiot.

I’ve been called an idiot many times, in some cases accurately. I don’t feel persecuted.
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FOUL!

Did Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania switch parties as a matter of pure political expediency, even of political survival?

Well . . . duh.

So did Sonny Perdue, and Richard Shelby, and a couple of smug Auburn twits a few years ago who called a press conference to “confess their sins” before switching to the straight and narrow of (Republican) political righteousness, and a few hundred other nervous Democrats in years of GOP dominance.

Shelby’s Damascus conversion, in particular, was interestingly timed, coming literally days after the 1994 “Contract With America” GOP takeover of Congress. In fact, the number of former Democrats who have jumped ship since the dawn of the Reagan Revolution in 1980 would fill a pretty good size file.

Yet to listen to the hyperventilation of the conservative media, especially here in the (Red) Peach State, you’d think we were talking about Arlen SPECTRE, a Bond flick nasty who throws people in shark tanks and makes nerve poison out of fish gonads.

"Arlen Specter has waddled and quacked and strutted his webbed feet for years," huffed the always entertaining Augusta Chronicle.

"Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter did more spinning Tuesday than a Maytag washing machine . . . he let his principles and his former party out to dry," was the verdict of the Savannah Morning News.

“Sometime there has to be an endowed chair of political survival in the name of Sen. Arlen Specter,” was the lead of the Marietta Daily Journal.

Local TV commentator Al Fleming scorned Specter as “a pathetic old man” -- which prompted one of our readers to speculate on how long it had been since Al looked into his own mirror . . . which in turn prompted my wife to speculate on whether Al even casts a reflection.

Give Specter this much (or don’t): He’s been relatively honest about his motives. He doesn’t think he can even win the primary as a Republican, so he’ll try to win one more round as a Democrat. For what it’s worth, I think he’s probably toast anyway.

It was interesting to hear Specter’s spin on the familiar “I didn’t leave the party – the party left me” routine parroted by 25 years of Democratic ship-jumpers. In his case, it sounds valid: Right-wing fulminations notwithstanding, Specter is a conservative in the Goldwater-Rockefeller-Eisenhower (even, in some ways, McCain) tradition. As he’s watched his party taken over by wing nuts, Specter, like McCain, has seldom hesitated to speak out against the grosser excesses of the right.

To acknowledge anything principled in that, of course, it is first necessary to acknowledge that the right is capable of excess. Which is, I suspect, where rational response to Arlen Specter inevitably breaks down.

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