Clever Rhetorical Tricks

Here's a classic example of one of the great innovations in rhetorical technique perfected by the modern right. It involves taking some nutty thing that someone tangentially related to the Democratic Party or vaguely on the left of the political spectrum said (Michael Moore and Ward Churchill are good candidates, but if need be, you can find some obscure adjunct professor and make him a celebrity to serve this purpose), and then making that nutty thing stand in for other things that you don't want to talk about.

Apparently a few people have begun using the word "impeachment" in relation to Bush. Not a new phenomenon; Congressman John Conyers introduced articles of impeachment several years ago. It's not going to happen. A congressional minority can't move articles of impeachment. Further, as "KagroX" pointed out on The Next Hurrah recently, Bush is "impeachment-proof" because the public was exhausted and repulsed by the spectacle of the Clinton administration, which made it seem a tawdry and partisan tactic. (Which corresponds to my pet theory about why Reagan was the "Teflon President" -- having effectively rejected three presidents in a row -- Nixon, Ford, Carter, and four if you want to count LBJ -- the public had no appetitite to do so again.

Anyway, it seems that Ralph Nader joined this call for impeachment a few days ago. I won't link to his article, which appeared in the Boston Globe, for the simple reasaon that if RALPH NADER wants to lecture anyone that Bush is a criminal president, he's got some major apologizing to do first. (A handwritten personal apology to everyone who voted for him or Gore might get him about halfway there, and then we'll negotiate.) Nader's argument, however, is that the Downing Street memo revealing that Bush intended to go to war in Iraq regardless of compliance with UN resolutions and in plain violation of international law, is sufficient grounds for impeachment. (Which I think it is, of course, and so is the fraud on the costs of the Medicare bill, the deception on Iraq WMD, the misuse of federal funds for self-promotion, and a few other things. But who cares what I think? Go persuade Mr. Sensenbrenner. )

And then a few days ago, John Kerry told an editorial board the following:

"When I go back (to Washington) on Monday, I am going to raise the issue," he said of the [Downing Street] memo, which has not been disputed by either the British or American governments. "I think it's a stunning, unbelievably simple and understandable statement of the truth and a profoundly important document that raises stunning issues here at home. And it's amazing to me the way it escaped major media discussion.

So, over on redstate.org (still the best conservative site), Kerry's call for discussion of the memo gets turned into the idea that Kerry has joined the "moonbat" call for Bush's impeachment. Kerry didn't mention impeachment at all. All he mentioned was a memo that someone else (Nader, and possibly others) had mentioned in the context of impeachment.

But now any mention of the memo makes you automatically a nut calling for impeachment. And instead of discussing the memo, we'll argue about impeachment.

Very clever. But there's a limit to these tricks, and I think it's been reached.

Comments

[nlacey]

Tricks yes, but please check out article entitled "The Other Bomb Drops" by Jeremy Scahill at The Nation. (June 1, 2005

[radish]

Could you clarify what you mean by "limit?" I'd agree that the sort of smoke and mirrors you're talking about have reached a point of diminishing impact on the news cycle, but I certainly don't expect it to diminish per se, and it may well regain its effectiveness sooner than we expect. The flip side of your observation is that we've also reached the point where even a lukewarm Republican is faced with a terrifying climbdown the moment they acknowledge their own role in bringing the US to where we are today. Never mind the dominionists and kleptocrats who think where we are is just fine.

My admiration for Leon Festinger might color my view of this, but I think most people prefer cognitive dissonance to humiliation. And from a Republican perspective, the rhetorical options grow ever fewer while the humiliation attached to even topical concessions (such as the authenticity of the Downing Street minutes) grows ever greater. The modern GOP's malfeasance and misfeasance are so staggering and so well-documented that the number of issues that can be finessed with hairsplitting, or drowned in a sea of irrelevant detail, or addressed with any of your garden variety fallacies is approaching zero. What's left when ideology collapses is all too often identity, with its ever-appealing dolchstosslegende and jingoism.

D-Cambodia, cave-dwelling moonbats, oiled and sharpened chop-busters, and advice to avoid being sucked into dialogs? From what little I know about human nature, I'm finding it hard to imagine how the socioeconomic crises we're about to experience are going to make the average Redstater (or kossack for that matter) less bombastic or more contemplative.

[murky]

Funny to find a sober and informed voice reference the Downing memo as no-brainer grounds for impeachment. I gobbled up the first news story I read about it (in the New Yorker?) with excitement but was so disappointed with the money quote I haven't read hardly anything about it since. To me, it meshes nicely with our worst suspicions but meshes with lots of other scenarios besides, none of which I would have thought impeachable. Care to elaborate or cite somebody who you think does so intelligently?

[kth]

Political differences ought not to be impeachable, and it was only slightly less evident in Nov 2004 than now that Bush & Co lied with impunity in the runup to the Iraq War. But he got reelected anyway, and impeaching Bush now would be no more legitimate than the impeachment of Clinton or the recall of Gray Davis (neither of which had the slightest fig-leaf of legitimacy).

That said, hard to see how anyone who supported the other two abortions of democracy is in a position to insist on this principle when it's their guy's turn in the barrel.

[praktike]

Hitler was a vegetarian.

[Oleary]

Bush should be impeached. He's committed high crimes and misdemeanors. I don't care if it's probable or not, it must be attempted. We are definitely losing our country and if you can't see that you aren't paying attention.

Who would have thought Nixon would ever resign on Saturday night, June 17, 1972. I know there was a democratic congress then.

[jonnybutter]

But now any mention of the memo makes you automatically a nut calling for impeachment.

This technique reminds me of the classic, dysfunctional line you used to hear ad nauseum in soap operas and teevee 'dramas' in the 60s and 70s: 'What's THAT supposed to mean?". Welcome to...The EDGE...of Night.

[anciano]

What is your goal? Any fool can see that Bush and Blair gamed this war and crazily abandoned the Afghan campaign far too soon. We see that Greenspan pulled us out of the Stock market crash with low interest rates, lots of money and a housing bubble. Now there's no turning back- can't raise interest rates much because that would cause too many foreclosures, can't deal with either education or healthcare because Bush’s stuck onto the Iraq tar baby. So we’ll feed the housing boom with lower rates and suffer a bigger crash down the road, when GWB and the Span are out of Washington. In the Vietnam era, people believed that they could change things. Most of us trusted Congress. Now we know that Congress is owned locked stock and barrel, we know that our kids won't be drafted, and we prefer to sit and kvetch. After all, Senator Inhofe assures us that global warming is a leftist conspiracy. Impeachment proceedings were filed against Truman. What did that accomplish? Unless there is a big economic crash or ordinary kids start getting drafted, nobody in Congress will lift a finger about any of these issues. After all, they are silent about the gulag in Guantanamo. They’ll keep playing with the pie in the sky stem cell stuff, and maybe pass a bill requiring that Michael Jackson and Scott Peterson be deported.

[Michael Stickings]

The comment that there's a "gulag in Guantanamo" is precisely what Mark's getting at. Democrats (sensible ones anyway) are NOT calling for Bush's impeachment and there's NO gulag at Guantanamo. Come on, people, let's keep things in perspective. Just see David Bosco's comparison of Guantanamo and the real gulags in TNR. I'm more than willing to stand firm against Bush, his administration, the Republican Party, and the conservative movement generally. Indeed, I do that day after day over at my own blog (The
Reaction). But it serves absolutely no useful purpose to exaggerate our claims by referring to impeachment or by suggesting that the U.S. government is running concentration camps. For God's sake, we might not like what's going on out there, but let's dispense with the moral equivalency nonsense. No matter how bad our political opponents are, let's remember that, in the end, we're on the same side.

I say this as a Canadian living in the relative comfort of social democratic Toronto, but I still love America and what it stands for -- in short, I still BELIEVE in America, no matter who's in the White House.

Mark's right. The right does pinpoint a single leftist and use him (or her) to taint liberals generally. But let's not do the same to the right or otherwise descend to such depths that we assign Bush's America the same moral equivalancy as Saddam's Iraq (or Stalin's Russia). On this, I think Jon Stewart is right. I've only seen angry on his show once, and that was when the guest, of all people, was Air America's Janeane Garofalo (presumably a friend, given their initial banter). Why? Because she had nothing to say other than to imply that Bush was the second coming of Hitler. You could see he was furious. Now, the right has its crazies, too, don't get me wrong. But let's not do to Bush what they did to Clinton. Let's follow Jon Stewart's suggestion and assume that they're serious about their ideas, that they truly believe in what they're doing. And then let's engage them on the playing field of ideas. Name-calling and talk of impeachment won't get us anywhere. We need sound strategy, proven tactics, and effective framing, yes, but we also need to stand up confidently for what we believe in and to challenge Republicans in a serious and reasoned way.

[Lloyd]

Great post Michael S. I can only add to it with the following question:

Does Howard Dean as DNC Chair help or hurt the Republicans use of the "Rhetorical Trick" to paint the Democratic Party as a fever swamp?

[Matt McIrvin]

If I'm reading Mark right, he said that he personally thinks Bush has committed impeachable offenses (and I do too). His point was that John Kerry never said that.

Brad DeLong, a thoroughly reasonable Democrat who has nothing but disdain for what he calls Jacobin lunacy, likes to bring out the line "Impeach Bush and Cheney now" periodically. He knows perfectly well that it's never going to happen, but it's useful to remind people that the cause is there.

I did think, at one time, that we're all on the same side. I'm gradually losing that sense. Republican TV talking heads and columnists like Coulter, Hannity and Limbaugh consistently describe people like me as enemies of America, traitors and lovers of terrorism; they're getting talking points handed to them from a Republican Party apparatus that is deeply entangled with the administration. It's very difficult to play nice under these conditions.

These people seem to want to be my enemy. The problem is that Michael is right in another sense: part of the game plan is to goad liberals into adopting the paranoid style so that they look crazy. Part of winning is going to be maintaining superhuman levels of cool. But it's not easy.

[Michael J.W. Stickings]

Thanks for the kind words, Lloyd. I suppose it's debatable whether or not Bush, Cheney, and their cronies have committed impeachable offenses. And there's nothing wrong with talking about those offenses, pondering impeachment, and otherwise rallying together against them.

I guess my point is that we as Democrats need to spend our time thinking seriously about what we stand for and, beyond that, how to channel what we stand for into electoral success. Obviously, a lot of interesting discussion is happening over at TPM Cafe, where I comment from time to time and cross-post some of my blog posts. I'd also recommend an interesting post by Steve Soto at The Left Coaster (see here). Soto essentially argues that we need to learn from the Republicans and even adopt some of their winning strategies. I don't entirely agree with it (as you can see here), but it's provocative nonetheless.

I'm torn, and it would be great to hear some of your views on this: On the one hand, I do think that Democrats (and liberals generally) need to think about what they stand for. After all, there is something to be said for America as a philosophically conservative nation (see Micklethwait and Wooldridge). As a student of political philosophy, I have long thought that America is some fusion of Hobbes (security) and Locke (liberty) -- that is, classically liberal in a full sense -- along with a Christian tradition rooted in Protestant evangelism. The conservative movement is currently itself a fusion of those very three elements: Hobbes (national security, military, police), Locke (free market capitalism, guns, libertarianism generally), Protestantism (the evangelical right generally). Now, there are obvious contradictions here, but somehow the current conservative movement seems to match perfectly with America's foundational philosophical and theological spirit. Liberalism, on the other hand, has more or less ceded religion to the right, and its two Hobbesian and Lockean elements (social welfare as security and moral freedom as liberty) tend to run counter to America's foundational spirit, not to mention with its general ethos. This leads me to believe that Democrats would succeed again if they embraced a tougher stance on national security issues and refocused on individual responsibility and less reliance on government to solve society's ills. Is is possible that American liberalism is seeking to remake America along profoundly un-American lines? I'm not sure, but it's worthy of further thought.

On the other hand, are the Democrats really doing all that badly? Given all that was going on last year -- the memories of 9/11, the threat of terrorism (which Bush, as president, was able to manipulate to his own benefit), and the bully pulpit in a time of war, not to mention mass mobilization of evangelical voters -- Bush barely won re-election. And it's not as if Kerry was such a great candidate. I mean, if Gore, a terrible candidate, had managed to pull out a victory in 2000 (which he may have done anyway!), we wouldn't even be talking about this now.

Anyway, please excuse the long post. Obviously, it's a topic that arouses one's fire.

One final point: I agree entirely with Matt's excellent assertion that "[p]art of winning is going to be maintaining superhuman levels of cool". No matter how "cool" I try to be, the likes of Coulter, Malkin, O'Reilly, and Hannity are enough to drive anyone over the edge. We must be sure not to be like them, nor to play their game.

[Michael J.W. Stickings]

Thanks for the kind words, Lloyd. I suppose it's debatable whether or not Bush, Cheney, and their cronies have committed impeachable offenses. And there's nothing wrong with talking about those offenses, pondering impeachment, and otherwise rallying together against them.

I guess my point is that we as Democrats need to spend our time thinking seriously about what we stand for and, beyond that, how to channel what we stand for into electoral success. Obviously, a lot of interesting discussion is happening over at TPM Cafe, where I comment from time to time and cross-post some of my blog posts. I'd also recommend an interesting post by Steve Soto at The Left Coaster (see here). Soto essentially argues that we need to learn from the Republicans and even adopt some of their winning strategies. I don't entirely agree with it (as you can see here), but it's provocative nonetheless.

I'm torn, and it would be great to hear some of your views on this: On the one hand, I do think that Democrats (and liberals generally) need to think about what they stand for. After all, there is something to be said for America as a philosophically conservative nation (see Micklethwait and Wooldridge). As a student of political philosophy, I have long thought that America is some fusion of Hobbes (security) and Locke (liberty) -- that is, classically liberal in a full sense -- along with a Christian tradition rooted in Protestant evangelism. The conservative movement is currently itself a fusion of those very three elements: Hobbes (national security, military, police), Locke (free market capitalism, guns, libertarianism generally), Protestantism (the evangelical right generally). Now, there are obvious contradictions here, but somehow the current conservative movement seems to match perfectly with America's foundational philosophical and theological spirit. Liberalism, on the other hand, has more or less ceded religion to the right, and its two Hobbesian and Lockean elements (social welfare as security and moral freedom as liberty) tend to run counter to America's foundational spirit, not to mention with its general ethos. This leads me to believe that Democrats would succeed again if they embraced a tougher stance on national security issues and refocused on individual responsibility and less reliance on government to solve society's ills. Is is possible that American liberalism is seeking to remake America along profoundly un-American lines? I'm not sure, but it's worthy of further thought.

On the other hand, are the Democrats really doing all that badly? Given all that was going on last year -- the memories of 9/11, the threat of terrorism (which Bush, as president, was able to manipulate to his own benefit), and the bully pulpit in a time of war, not to mention mass mobilization of evangelical voters -- Bush barely won re-election. And it's not as if Kerry was such a great candidate. I mean, if Gore, a terrible candidate, had managed to pull out a victory in 2000 (which he may have done anyway!), we wouldn't even be talking about this now.

Anyway, please excuse the long post. Obviously, it's a topic that arouses one's fire.

One final point: I agree entirely with Matt's excellent assertion that "[p]art of winning is going to be maintaining superhuman levels of cool". No matter how "cool" I try to be, the likes of Coulter, Malkin, O'Reilly, and Hannity are enough to drive anyone over the edge. We must be sure not to be like them, nor to play their game.

[Marc Schneider]

Trying to win the argument by impeaching Bush is crazy. It's a political issue. I'm not sure what high crimes and misdemeanors he may have committed. Even if he lied about the war, it wasn't under oath, so I don't see how you get him for perjury. If you impeached every president that lied or misled the public, we would be changing governments like Italy.

I agree 100% with Michael Stickings comments. Part of what infuriates me about AI's gulag comment is that it is so politically stupid. By making an exaggerated comparison between Guantanamo and the Gulag, it makes it easy to simply dismiss the actual abuses that occurred at Guantanamo. And, yes, there is a double standard for liberals and conservatives. Conservatives can exaggerate with impunity because more Americans sympathize with their general position (or at least they have a larger base of support). Liberals have to be precise and measured when criticizing Bush. That's why exaggerations hurt the Democrats far more than they hurt the Republicans and why Air America, IMO, is a bad idea. It may not be fair, but it's life.

[Matt McIrvin]

The problem with these kinds of discussions is that just about anything can be pulled out as the reason Democrats have been losing elections. Left to center: "Yeah, you've been telling Democrats to be precise and measured and concede points logically for the past four years, and we lost!" Center to left: "Well, you've been telling us to stand up and fight harder and use bloody-minded loaded rhetoric for the past four years, and we lost!" Repeat ad nauseam.

My personality historically tends to favor "be precise and measured" but my *fears* say "whack 'em, smear 'em, any means necessary, the world is ending, hoard canned goods, arm for the revolution," so a lot of this goes on in my own head.

"Liberalism, on the other hand, has more or less ceded religion to the right, and its two Hobbesian and Lockean elements (social welfare as security and moral freedom as liberty) tend to run counter to America's foundational spirit, not to mention with its general ethos."

Well, FDR's on the dime and Jefferson's on the nickel. I guess you could count those as alien intrusions somehow. I don't think they are.

[Pokey]

What's a moonbat? I linked to a wingnut site from Atrios and was welcomed as a moonbat. Can't be too bad then.

I just ordered "Impeach Bush" bumper stickers for friends and family, but I'll probably use the "Who Would Jesus Bomb" sticker to balance my old "We're making enemies faster than we can kill them" sticker. My wife and children will get the impeachment stickers.

That Bush is impeachment proof is no reason not to call for it. Bob Barr was calling for Clinton's impeachment long before it became popular. Furthermore, the impeachment stickers will piss off the assholes with W's all over their pickups, not an insignificant number here in Louisiana. I think of it as returning the favor.

History will reveal W.'s as the most corrupt administration in U.S. history. It's not just lying to build support for an unnecessary and disastrous war leading to civil war. With the exception of Iraq, the neocon crusade and Bush's personal vendetta, every act in the 1st 4 years was geared toward reelection. Payoffs such as tax relief for the super wealthy, relaxed environmental regulations, the prohibition of negotiation of drug prices for the Medicare drug debacle, were behind every proposal of the Bush administration. For those of you who suggest we turn the other cheek, be gentlemen, and bend over, I say NO.

Impeach the bastard.