In this new era of politics, daring to question President Obama and his handlers is all but considered treason. However, the policies of President Obama are leading the United States down the road of socialism. From what the polls say, the vast majority of Americans embrace that. That just shows marked ignorance of American history.
It was President Bush, after all, who lashed out at Democrats in the run-up to the mid-term elections, declaring them virtual traitors on October 31, 2006:
"However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses."President Bush, of course, has had plenty of company among the leading lights of the Republican Party in questioning the patriotism of the Democratic opposition. In 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney described the significance of a John Kerry victory, "if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again." And just the day before President Bush's faux olive branch, White House press secretary Tony Snow got in the act. Snow, who had once branded now Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid "wheezy prophets of the Defeatocrat Party," tried to tar the Democrats with the traitors' brush:
"As you know, and I've said many times, Osama bin Laden thought the lack of American resolve was a key reason why he could inspire people to come after us on September 11th. I am not accusing members of the Senate of inviting carnage on the United States of America. I'm simply saying, you think about what impact it may have."The President's now emasculated allies in Congress are among the most notorious - and frequent - violators of Bush's supposed call for bipartisanship on national security matters. In the wake of the debate over the Military Commissions Act and its gutting of habeas corpus rights, then House Speaker Dennis Hastert attacked the Democrats who would "would gingerly pamper the terrorists who plan to destroy innocent Americans' lives," adding, "surprise that the Democrats in the House put their liberal agenda ahead of the security of America." Hastert was joined by the mercifully former House Majority Leader John Boehner(R-OH), who pronounced:
"The Democrats' partisan opposition to this program, at the urging of the radical leftist element of their Party, provides further proof that they continue to put politics ahead of addressing the security concerns of the American people...it underscores why the American people don't trust Democrats when it comes to national and homeland security."
Or take Ann Coulter (please*):
Article III of the United States Constitution specifies that "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort."
In latching onto a powerful word with a specific legal meaning and casually leveling the charge as a blanket accusation against a wide array of people (as she did with slander, which is a defamatory verbal statement), Coulter is attempting to smear virtually anyone who disagrees with her views on foreign policy as treasonous. "Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason," she writes on the first page of the book. "Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. This is their essence." (p. 1)
At times, Coulter portrays liberals and the left as engaged in a grand conspiracy to destroy the United States:
While undermining victory in the Cold War, liberals dedicated themselves to mainstreaming Communist ideals at home... Betraying the manifest national defense objectives of the country is only part of the left's treasonous scheme. They aim to destroy America from the inside with their relentless attacks on morality and the truth. (p. 289)At others, she instead insinuates that disagreeing with her about US policy toward various hostile foreign countries or taking any action that could be construed as favorable to those countries' interests is equivalent to treasonous support for those countries. Here are two classic examples of this tactic:
As a rule of thumb, Democrats opposed anything opposed by their cherished Soviet Union. The Soviet Union did not like the idea of a militarily strong America. Neither did the Democrats! (p. 171)Democrats always had mysterious objections and secret "better" ways, which they would never tell us. Then they would vote whichever way would best advance Communist interests. (p. 177)In the end, Coulter doesn't care about such distinctions, and goes so far as to specifically reject any distinction based on motive in judging her standard of treason:
Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant. Fifty years of treason hasn't slowed them down. (p. 16)Of course, Coulter must engage in a complicated set of rhetorical tricks to accuse liberals of "fifty years of treason" (in a 2001 column, it was only "[t]wenty years of treason" - did inflation set in?). The book is primarily focused on the controversy over real and alleged Soviet espionage in the post-World War II era. We can certainly stipulate that Soviet agents who worked covertly inside the United States government did commit treason. But Coulter broadens the term to include virtually every liberal, leftist, Democrat or member of the media, in each case obscuring distinctions between individuals and stereotyping the entire group.
President Bush was running the charge as early as 2002, but, according to one report, it's a Republican standby going back to the Civil War:
When President Bush said this week that Senate Democrats were more concerned with union support than with national security, his campaign trail attack hardly broke new frontiers in American political discourse.
Despite Senator Tom Daschle's anguished demand for an apology, Mr. Bush's words came nowhere near the cold war charges that Democrats were ''soft on Communism'' and that their foreign policy was ''made in Moscow,'' or that Richard M. Nixon's opponent in the 1950 California Senate race was not the liberal Helen Gahagan Douglas but ''the pink lady'' because of her votes in the House. Nor was it remotely comparable to the invectives like ''baby killer'' or ''imperialist'' hurled by liberal anti-Vietnam War lawmakers at Democratic and Republican supporters of the war.
But the president's accusation was harsh stuff in the context of current American politics, where strong words reverberate on repetitive cable television and the dirty work of questioning the opposition's motives is usually left to surrogates.
From Mr. Daschle's perspective, his associates say, Mr. Bush's statement on Monday that ''the Senate is more interested in special interests in Washington and not interested in the security of the American people'' plainly spilled over from its stated context -- union rights in the proposed Department of Homeland Security. To Mr. Daschle it sounded like an ungrateful smear when he was already taking plenty of flak from his party caucus for trying to work out a resolution on war with Iraq that would satisfy the president.
Criticism does not come just from Democrats.
Representative Ray LaHood, a widely respected Illinois Republican, said, ''I thought that Daschle probably raised the decibel level too high, but Bush and Cheney and others on his team are making a mistake by trying to sell his Iraq policy on the campaign trail.''
Robert Teeter, a veteran Republican pollster, said he thought both men had been damaged by the exchange because ''the public likes the idea of being unified.''
Steve Hess, a speechwriter for Dwight D. Eisenhower and Mr. Nixon, said, ''To say the other side was not interested in national security was well over the line, a cheap shot.''
But, he said: ''That's nothing compared to the way American politics has been conducted over the past 200 years. We come from a pretty outrageous political tradition. So we really have become so much more civilized if something like George W. Bush's misstatement can so outrage us.''
The history of American political discourse on patriotism is hardly ennobling. Joel Silbey, a Cornell historian, said: ''This has always worked. It worked during the Civil War when the Republicans called the Democrats the party of treason.'' In recent years, he said, Democrats have had an onus of preferring negotiations to war, ''and the Republicans have been very quick to use it.''
I like the Henny Youngman link
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