Male cheerleaders and chicken hawks

While Republicans smear Democrats as unpatriotic, a look at the war record of many GOP leaders -- including President Bush -- shows a remarkable aversion to the front lines. Part 3 of "Big Lies."

By Joe Conason

Aug 20, 2003 | "Conservatives truly love America and support the armed forces, while liberals are unpatriotic draft dodgers." Of all the pernicious claptrap emitted by right-wing propagandists, none is more offensive than smearing liberals and Democrats as unpatriotic. The portrayal of a liberal elite that despises its own country has allowed conservatives to appropriate the flag, the national anthem, and other national symbols -- the heritage of every American -- as their movement's private property, and to misuse those symbols for narrow partisan purposes. To the extremists, anyone who doesn't pledge allegiance to the Republican platform is a "traitor."

Rank-and-file reactionaries out in the red-state hinterland may believe this tripe, but the Republican insiders know better. Living in major cities like New York and Washington, they can't avoid knowing liberals who have proudly served in the military, revere the Constitution and the flag, and share the values of liberty and democracy -- who are, indeed, just as patriotic as any conservative. That knowledge only makes their promotion of this slanderous myth more shameful.

Like so much other rightist cant, "liberals hate America" is a slogan designed to confuse and inflame the ignorant. And like many another successful frame-up, this one grossly exaggerates a small fact. On the far left there does exist a handful of annoying academics and activists -- typified by Noam Chomsky and Ramsey Clark -- whose ideas about America and the world haven't changed much since the '70s. Their politics hark back to a period when the criminal excesses of the Cold War in Indochina, Latin America and southern Africa had alienated many young Americans from our country. The overwhelming majority of those young people never contemplated any kind of unpatriotic act, and those who remained active in politics took up the challenge of democratic reform.

As for the remnant of ultra-leftists, whether they love America or not is for them to say. What they surely detest -- as they would be the first to affirm -- is American liberalism. That's what conservatives always forget (or pretend to forget) when quoting left-wing literature to prove that liberals hate and blame America.

Distinguishing fringe factions from the progressive majority is essential to wiping away the "anti-American" smear against liberals. It is a task complicated by the fact that, as a matter of constitutional principle, liberals consistently uphold the civil liberties of radicals at both ends of the spectrum. It's simple for conservatives to look patriotic by threatening dissenters or amending the Constitution to ban obnoxious behavior like flag-burning. But what could be more fundamentally American and patriotic than the liberal commitment to defend all of the freedoms symbolized by the Stars and Stripes?

The relentless disparagement of liberal patriotism by right-wing ideologues is an attempt to punish that commitment to free speech, and an abandonment of traditional American values of fair play and civic decency. There is nothing truly conservative about the conservatives' compulsion to divide the nation for their own political gain. There is nothing patriotic about perverting the natural love of country into suspicion, bitterness and hostility. (Strangely, many of the conservatives who seek to inflame hatred against their liberal neighbors would describe themselves as devout Christians -- but then some of our most jingoistic warmongers also claim to be true disciples of the Prince of Peace.)

In an earlier era there were Republican statesmen, such as the senators who initiated the censure of Joseph McCarthy, who considered such smear tactics contemptible. To those outraged colleagues, McCarthy's strategy betrayed real patriotism by falsely impugning the loyalty of innocent Americans for momentary personal advantage. The senators who finally stood up against their fellow Republican did so because they realized that his unfounded accusations of disloyalty were eroding national unity, constitutional authority, and intellectual freedom -- and assisting America's real enemies.

During the months preceding the war in Iraq, conservatives used the same sleazy tactics to disparage liberals, progressives and Democrats. Liberals who preferred inspections to invasion were denounced as unpatriotic. Democrats (and Republicans) who saw through the administration's disinformation and fumbling diplomacy were called appeasers. And the usual Republican suspects sought to paint all critics with the same smear brush, as if patriotism demanded mindless obedience to whatever spin might emanate from the Pentagon.

In their zeal to take partisan advantage of the war, Republican propagandists ignored the real complexities of the national debate over Iraq. The argument ranged across a spectrum that included left-leaning "hawks" such as House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, New Yorker editor David Remnick, and Paul Berman, author of "Terror and Liberalism"; and such prominent right-wing "doves" as Patrick Buchanan, Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul, and Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute. Not everyone who questioned the war shared Chomsky's hostility to American power, and not everyone who supported the war agreed with Bush's unilateralism. The truth about Iraq was complicated. So was the political lineup on either side of the war debate. But for the purpose of defaming Democrats and liberals, the right-wing bullies must keep their ideological categories simple.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, rhetorical bullying by the self-appointed sentinels has become shrill and continuous: Ann Coulter snarls that liberals must be threatened with execution to deter them from becoming "outright traitors." Andrew Sullivan warns against the "decadent enclaves" of East and West Coast liberals "mounting a fifth column" -- a term that means a group of secret sympathizers with the enemy -- in the war on terrorism. (He later blames "liberal culture" for the disloyalty of the young Californian who joined the Taliban.) The New York Post columnist Steve Dunleavy denounces "liberals, whom I regard as traitors," for daring to quote the Constitution in defense of civil liberties.

The modern mini-McCarthys are always eager to form a mob, to trample anyone who resists their immediate partisan objectives. When Vermont's Jim Jeffords went independent and Democrats regained control of the Senate in early 2001, the right found a new target to replace Bill Clinton, their perennial favorite. The conservative hit squad went after Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.

At first they denounced the soft-spoken South Dakotan as an "obstructionist" with no agenda except to thwart President Bush. This was a ridiculous overstatement, but not a slur. By the end of the year, however, the campaign against Daschle turned hard and dirty. Newspapers all over his home state suddenly published full-page advertisements with photos of Daschle and Saddam Hussein and a headline shrieking "What do these two men have in common?" The ads were sponsored by American Renewal, a group affiliated with religious right broadcaster James Dobson that works closely with White House political director Karl Rove. Their ostensible reason for aligning Daschle with Saddam was the Democrat's opposition to oil-drilling in the Alaska wildlife reserve (an opinion long shared by most Americans).

What disturbed many observers was that those Daschle-bashing ads appeared at a time when nearly every Democratic elected official in the country had affirmatively answered the president's call for bipartisan unity against terrorism. But the blitz mounted by the Dobson outfit in South Dakota was actually part of a carefully coordinated partisan scheme to make Tom Daschle into a negative symbol. "It's time for Congressional Republicans to personalize the individual that is standing directly in the way of economic security, and even national security," advised a "talking points" memorandum issued to Senate Republicans by political consultant Frank Luntz. "Remember what the Democrats did to Gingrich? We need to do exactly the same thing to Daschle."

Within weeks after Congress returned from the holiday recess, Republican leaders resumed their mugging of Daschle, feigning terrible offense at mild remarks he had made about the progress of the war against al-Qaida and the imperative of capturing Osama bin Laden and the Taliban mullahs. Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, chairman of the GOP's congressional campaign committee, ranted that Daschle's "divisive comments have the effect of giving aid and comfort to our enemies by allowing them to exploit divisions in our country." House Majority Whip Tom DeLay called Daschle's comments "disgusting."

The Democratic leader shrugged off DeLay and Davis with a thin smile. He wouldn't be provoked, even when Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott refused to repudiate the insinuation of treason against him on national television and instead seemed to endorse it. "How dare Senator Daschle criticize President Bush while we are fighting our war on terrorism?" cried Lott.

Daschle should have pounced on that invitation to compare their respective patriotic credentials, which would hardly have been flattering to Lott -- and would have exploded a widespread delusion about liberals and conservatives. The flag-flapping, ultranationalist Republican had not only avoided the draft with student deferments, but had also had spent the early years of the Vietnam conflict waving pom-poms as a cheerleader at Ole Miss. The thoughtful but determined Daschle, who rarely spoke about his own military service, had served three years in the Air Force after college as an intelligence officer in the Strategic Air Command.

It was Sen. John Kerry, not Daschle, who addressed the Republican leaders in the manner they deserved. At a Democratic dinner in New Hampshire, the senator from Massachusetts stood up and said, "Let me be clear tonight to Senator Lott and to Tom DeLay. One of the lessons that I learned in Vietnam -- a war they did not have to endure -- and one of the basic vows of commitment that I made to myself, was that if I ever reached a position of responsibility, I would never stop asking questions that make a democracy strong ... Those who try to stifle the vibrancy of our democracy and shield policies from scrutiny behind a false cloak of patriotism miss the real value of what our troops defend and how we best defend our troops."

Kerry received a standing ovation from the New Hampshire Democrats. Thus encouraged, he repeated his roasting of the Republican leaders at a press conference the following day. As a Vietnam combat veteran who earned three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, and a Silver Star in two Navy tours -- and who later founded Vietnam Veterans Against the War -- Kerry had ample stature to challenge the character assassins.

What the Daschle episode revealed was how routinely Republicans and conservatives resort to the kind of hyperbole that was once heard only from extremists and bigots. The Kerry speech electrified his audience because, like so many other liberals, they were tired of listening to conservatives blast away at their patriotism unanswered. At long last, someone had fired back.

Next Page: Rich Republicans hiding in the National Guard

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