Monday

Cowards and Liars

To be a Republican these days, one must be a liar or a coward or both. Exceptions are few and far between. As their numbers shrink, radical conservatives are getting shriller and ruder and hide behind anonymity and lack of accountability. The scatalogical insult is more common than a reasoned argument since they know they'll lose the argument. This kind of thing worked fine for them as bullies on grade school playgrounds, but in the adult world it just makes them look childish. At best. At worst it makes them look like Soviet propagandists, trying to browbeat their opponents by continued lies and whining invective.

Last week's column was about Ronald "Shotgun Wedding" Reagan. It was a companion piece to a letter published in the Mpls Star Tribune the Friday before (and which Bartcop printed as well). Here is the letter I wrote. The first line is in italics because the paper left it out.

Editing out the first line is telling, especially since right-wing letter writers usually start off with far worse characterizations. I've talked to some of the people on the Opinion Page at the Strib, and they're all cowed by bullies accusing them of being "liberal", when the opposite is usually true.

I'm politically active, expressing my opinions on Shockwave and in the newspaper's letter column. The reaction to this letter was typical: None of the conservatives who called identified themselves, and all the letters I got had no return address and were not signed. Cowards. Meanwhile, all calls from liberals (whether they agree with me or not) start off with them giving their name, and all letters are signed. For the most part, when I get a letter without a return address I write across it, "refused, return to sender". Sometimes I open them just to see if they dared sign their name. Of course, they never do. I've complained about the anonymous rudeness (not to mention the occasional death threat) to the Reader Representative at the Star Tribune. He said, "oh, we know who that is" but refused to tell me.

Every now and then I get e-mail. As usual, the conservatives never actually argue, they just sling insults... and don't give their names. Reply to the e-mail bounces. On the rare occasion that the reply doesn't simply bounce, chances are high that I'll never hear from these idiots again. Indeed, I have a whole folder for "Right Wing Idiots". I don't know why I keep this garbage; probably to remind myself of who I'd be allies with when I find myself holding a conservative opinion.

But recently I've noticed a phenomona: The hoax letter writing campaign. This isn't new (Ross Perot did it for Nixon), but the use of the net to spread propaganda is rising. I've gotten several e-mails expressing the absolute fact about something which later turns up as (in Al Franken's description) "A well-known internet hoax". A good example is the recent flap when fake letters from soldiers in Iraq were widely printed. It turned out that the soldiers never wrote those letters and disagreed with the contents, sometimes vehemently. Those letters were written for them, without their knowledge or permission. (The guy claimed he had a statement from them, but it was awfully general and he never showed them the letter he was sending in their name.)

The latest e-mail I got is a good example of a seemingly reasonable response that turned out to be less than it appeared. I'll withhold the name it was sent under, even though the e-mail address is a generic yahoo.com account and Googling his name doesn't turn up anything. By itself, this doesn't prove much, but it's another thing that raises a red flag.

This seemed more reasonable than the usual scatalogical rant, and I replied to it. In retrospect, the clues were there that it was from a professional propagandist: 1) "Your website", without mentioning anything specific. I have a lot of politics on my site(s), but I have a lot of other stuff too. 2) At no point does the writer actually mention any of my positions. 3) Very little on the website is about Bush Lite, though some is. What was he searching for that led him to my site? 4) He is horribly confused if he thinks that what I write is "downright hateful" and Rush, Drudge, Rove, O'Reilly, Fox News et al isn't. 5) The misspelled "here", which implies that it was automatically generated and went through a computer spell-checker without a human looking it over. I'm not going to dismiss an entire letter writer for being a bad speller, but it's another red flag. And 6) A lot of this phraseology is politicaly correct. Conservatives take their marching orders from the top, just like the Soviets did, and rarely write much that isn't handed to them or pounded into their ears for hours.

But I replied. Lo and behold, I got into an actual conversation! Well, a one-sided conversation anyway. I attempted to ascertain what part of my website he was going on about, unsuccessfully. I tried to point out that "POTUS" had lied to our troops, lied to him and lied to me, but that just generated another standard rant. At last! The Inner Conservative! Dittoheads are chock full of lies they'll defend to the death of our soldiers. And at a different level, hired guns are well paid to spread lies. (Remember when Republican political consultant Ed Rollins bragged that he spent $500,000 to suppress the black vote in New Jersey? Remember that the conservative news media didn't think it was much of a story?) Here are some direct quotes, with my comments.

Didn't the UN acknowledge the fact that the whole world believed Saddam had WMD before we went to war? That's a lie. In fact, the exact opposite is true: Most members of the UN believed Hans Blix when he said that he hadn't found any and that it was unlikely that there were WMD around. But he was willing to continue looking. And, of course, we know now that Bush was lying. Rumsfeld was lying when he said that he knew the locations of the caches. Still, notice the rhetorical trick: "Didn't they acknowledge the fact that most people believed..." That's a bunch of slimy qualifiers, and not true. No one "acknowledged that people believed", and there was no "fact" there. Sounds like it was written by someone in the White House. Or even higher up in the food chain: From Fox.

Isn't that why the UN threatened to remove Saddam from power if he didn't produce proof that the stockpile which Irag was on record as having had been destroyed? Another lie. The UN wanted to remove Saddam from power if he HAD "the stockpile". But he had been producing proof that the arms in question were destroyed, and UN inspectors backed him up. At that point, Saddam had produced more documents than Dick Cheney had about his energy meeting or Bush had about his lack of action before 9/11.

Do you seriously believe that Saddam Hussein, a terrible despot and the orchestrator of terrible genocides against his own people neighboring Kurds posed no threat to us and had no arsenal? Ah, the gravumen of the neocon argument. The answer, of course, is yes. We knew then and know even better now that Saddam posed NO threat TO US. The genocides in question occurred mostly in the 80s, when Reagan/Bush was giving him arms and support, and right after Poppy Bush let Saddam off the hook after the Gulf War and then reneged on his promise to the Kurds (among others). This is one of those "are you SURE?????" non-arguments that passes for proof to the radical right. It's an appeal to fear, and I don't forgive Bush for going after the wrong despot.

Since they found fighter jets buried in the desert, don't you think maybe they hid a few things? I hadn't heard about this before, and did a Google Search. All the sources were comments on freerepublic.com or from dittoheads on other message boards. I found nothing that backed the statement up. It may very well be another hoax. But still, I can well imagine that non-airworthy jets were stripped of useful parts and then the desert winds blew sand over them. The main point that the propagandists are desperate for you to ignore: We FOUND them (assuming any part of the story is true). If we can find buried jets, we can find WMDs which are much larger and harder to hide (and Rummy knows their locations for sure).

I replied to his letter at length. He, of course, just ducked out of the conversation, tearfully saying he wouldn't even read any other message from me. At no point did he provide a cite for anything he said (naturally, since he was lying) or even bother to refute anything I said. He just ran away.

I don't want to pick on one letter writer, no matter how stupid and suspicious. Perhaps he really is one gullible guy who spends hours and hours listening to hate radio until his brain is mush. Maybe he is Karl Rove's minion on another disinformation campaign. Maybe somewhere in between. But I'm tired of dealing with the far right who are doing nothing but acting like communists. These people are lying, and too many of them are lying with malice aforethought. And now they're being called on it. And when called on their lies, conservatives either lie some more, spew insults or run away. Fortunately, I don't have to sink to their level.

So my correspondent was right at last: I am putting this on a web page and people are hearing about it. I am doing good by spreading the truth. Thanks for the suggestion.

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