Inelegance in Political Opinion

No one would ever suggest that the discourse of Bill O’Reilly of Fox News is elegant, or subtle and nuanced.  He prides himself on being blunt.  As far back as 2003 everyone seemed to notice his usual rejoinder to any challenge to his views was to tell the person with the divergent view to “just shut up.”  As a rhetorical device that’s much quicker than carefully explaining that the “other view” is beyond the pale and reasonable people do not hold such views, and allowing that view to be aired would thus be a disservice to the public, and would be morally wrong, actually, and irresponsible in some journalistic way (at least as he seems to see the limits of responsible journalism) – but it’s the same thing.   Everyone seemed to know what he meant, so he didn’t have to say all those words.  The two words – “Shut up!” – were much more efficient, as kind of widely-understood shorthand.  Or they were the rude and spiteful words of someone absurdly defensive and insecure, and certainly afraid to discuss ideas that were new to him, or that challenged his.  Which was it?  We report, you decide.

 

That was more than four years ago, and he seldom uses that particular rhetorical shorthand now.  Perhaps even he decided it was just too rude, and made him look foolish, simple-minded and weak.  You can imagine how he worked that out, musing alone in his office.  If people are too stupid to infer his subtle reasoning about the nature of appropriate and non-appropriate public discussion from his two word short version of same, so be it.  Hey, what are you going to do?

 

But now, with the latest controversy swirling around him, his recent remarks which most people regarded as blatantly racist, or at the most generous, absurdly tone-deaf (previously discussed here), he seems to have moved beyond the “shut up” business into another rhetorical realm.  He doesn’t appreciate being called a racist, and he is taking a new approach –

 

You smear somebody and you can’t back it up, you’re gonna get it. … You go after somebody’s family, you go after them and smear them with defamation that you can’t back up, I’m coming to your house. I’m coming to your house. You’ll have a camera up your nose. OK?

 

If I could strangle these people and not go to hell and get executed … I would - but I can’t.  All I can do is expose them.  And I will.

 

My campaign to hold the corrupt media responsible is going to help your life. Because no longer will these smear merchants be allowed to get away with it, as long as I’m in the chair. As long as I’m here, I’m hunting them down. And that means everybody.

 

That’s novel.  That’s not covered in classic rhetoric – the forms, means, and strategies for persuading an audience of the correctness of the orator’s arguments.  Of course it’s not covered.  It’s a step beyond rhetoric – and as he claims, his attacks are going to help everyone.  Those who have the wrong opinions or get the wrong ideas will pay, dearly.  Screw appropriate argumentation.

 

Of course this is bizarre – but he seems to need to demonstrate to his audience how angry he is, which somehow will convince them he is right and everyone else is wrong.  This sounds, oddly enough, like the philosophic basis of our foreign policy for the last six years – we are angry so we must be right – but never mind.  That is another topic entirely.  One is, however, reminded of the Sophists –

 

They taught that every argument could be countered with an opposing argument, that an argument’s effectiveness derived from how “likely” it appeared to the audience (its probability of seeming true), and that any probability argument could be countered with an inverted probability argument. Thus, if it seemed likely that a strong, poor man were guilty of robbing a rich, weak man, the strong poor man could argue, on the contrary, that this very likelihood (that he would be a suspect) makes it unlikely that he committed the crime, since he would most likely be apprehended for the crime. They also taught and were known for their ability to make the weaker (or worse) argument the stronger (or better).

 

Aristophanes parodies these inversions in his play The Clouds – but who cares?  If you made fun of O’Reilly watch this video spoof – Keith Olbermann on MSNBC demonstrates techniques to use when the O’Reilly guys show up.

 

Over at the site Daily Kos – those folks O’Reilly says are just like the Nazis or the KKK, full of hate and madness – Hunter has a few things to say about Angry Bill –

 

The only reason Bill O’Reilly still has a job is because his employers have absolutely no standards for him to fall “below”. There’s nothing Bill can do, any more than Limbaugh, that would get his “bosses” to pull the plug on him, because his “bosses” count on his special style of fearmongering, hatred, and implicit racism as one of their most essential tools. That’s why he wasn’t fired after the workplace sexual harassment thing. That’s why he wasn’t fired after any of his other past statements or rants or paranoid delusions. That’s why Limbaugh can “attack the troops” as much as he wants and not only will he not be chastised for it, he’ll literally be praised on the floor of Congress for it by hard-right Republicans who count on him to provide their base with those constant declarations of carefully directed hate. It’s not a minor “oops” of the movement: without racism and several hours a day of paranoia, served up red-faced and blustering, about all the various Americans and foreigners and politicians and children and languages and ideologies that are coming to steal endangered conservatives away in the night, conservative talk radio and the Fox News channel would not even exist.

 

Rush Limbaugh can “attack the troops” as much as he wants?  You missed that?  Media Matters has the full story of that, with links and documentation, and it’s not pretty.  In any event, Hunter holds that the entire “conservative” media movement, from Limbaugh to O’Reilly to Coulter, “is based on old Andrew Dice Clay skits.”  And of course, this will all peter out –

 

Someday, America will get tired of people whose only shtick is comic hatred, just like they got tired of their antecedents. Ratings will begin to slide, and it will be all over: on to the new shtick.

 

Some of us doubt that.  There’s a big market for anger.  It may be that Fox News “is about under-the-surface bigotries, and that’s why their base tunes in,” and that’s why they exist as a network.  Even Hunter concedes that –

 

That’s why the immigration debate is constantly “hot”, and why we’re honestly moving towards building a modern-day, cross-continental “Great Wall of America” to keep those dangerous brown people out, and why “English First” will be forever with us, and why conservative bloggers give their attention over to conspiracy theories about how Mexico will conquer America to form Aztlan, or how the menace of Islam will, if undefeated, take over our nation and eliminate all the barber shops.

 

It pervades the debates about guns, about welfare, and about war. It is why the major Republican presidential candidates would rather lazily drift around the country for a day than be seen attending a “primarily black” debate. It’s why Bush ignored the NAACP for the first five years of his term before finally deigning to speak to it in 2006. It’s why you’ve got friggin’ conservative “movie critics” like Michael Medved offering up long, pseudo-intellectual buffooneries about how slavery wasn’t all that bad: after all, we saved our new black brethren from being born in that zebra-riddled craphole, Africa! Bigotry and paranoia based on ethnicity, nationality, class or ideology is the premise of every conservative book published, from Coulter to D’Souza to Hannity to Steyn to Spencer to whoever-the-hell-it-is-next-week.

 

Wait!  You say you missed the movie critic turned cultural conservative, Michael Medved, saying slavery in America wasn’t so bad?  Okay, so catch up.  He did.

 

But what we’re talking about here is the man from Fox News –

Bill O’Reilly went to a restaurant in a primarily black neighborhood, and wanted to impress on his listeners that by golly gee, they weren’t all like those uncouth kids in the rap videos today, with their loud music and foul language and my stars, Mabel! He was demonstrating his “tolerance” by serving up an extended litany of stereotypes, then admiring how normal a collection of “real” black Americans were in comparison to the fictions he painted. And that’s what a whole host of conservative radio and television hosts do on a weekly basis: paint extravagant pictures of threats to American citizens, government and culture based on outrageous bigotries, then preen over their own supposed tolerance in comparison. That’s the gimmick. Bigotry may need to be hidden under the surface, these days, but it does not need to be too hidden: just plausibly deniable.

 

The Sophists live on. And for a giggle read this on “displaced aggression” – making others, no matter how innocent, suffer for the pain we feel.  Consider –

 

It feels bad to be a victim, but the pain can often be somewhat assuaged by victimizing someone else in turn.

 

Recently physiologists have uncovered the hormonal basis for such behavior. Animals and people subjected to attack or threat experience “subordination stress,” as a result of which their adrenal hormones go up, along with blood pressure and the probability of developing ulcers. But - and this is crucial - when given the opportunity to “take it out” on someone else, victims show no sign of stress. By passing along their pain, they modulate their own internal distress while generating trouble for the next ones down the line. Think, the biologist Robert Sapolsky suggests, of the fellow who doesn’t get ulcers but causes them!

 

As to the evolutionary advantage of such a system, it seems clear that individuals who respond to painful situations by striking out at someone else have been more successful than those who sit back and “take it,” because such individuals are less likely to be victimized the next time around. In social species, including our own, individuals are exquisitely sensitive to a variant of Lenin’s dictum “who, whom?” The cost of being victimized includes a loss of reputation; that is, being seen as exploitable: Who did what to whom, and what happened as a result? Evolution would most likely reward victims who - even if unable to retaliate against the actual perpetrator - conspicuously “take it out” on someone else.

 

It is only natural, even if this long and scholarly item by David P. Barash, in The Chronicle of Higher Education no less, ends with this –

 

In a masterpiece of painfully accurate revelation, G. K. Chesterton once wrote that Christianity hasn’t been tried and found wanting; rather, it has been found difficult and left untried. Never has that been more true than in cases of personal pain and our reaction to it. Thus, Jesus urged us to love our enemies, and, if slapped, to turn the other cheek. But for millennia - before Jesus and after - human beings and their animal brethren have been far more likely to respond to pain and injury with a retaliating barrage of the same sort, generating yet more injury, more pain.

 

Perhaps Jesus did not entirely appreciate the magnitude of the demand he was making upon Homo sapiens, because in asking his followers to refrain from retaliation - to absorb pain without passing it on to someone else - he was asking people to inhibit one of their most widely shared, deep-seated inclinations. Nonetheless, potential solutions are all based on an equally deep, equally shared truth: that human beings, perhaps unique among animals, are capable, at least on occasion, and once the issues are made clear, of acting against the promptings of their often troublesome bio-logic.

 

Don’t expect that from Bill, and note what Digby, watching Wolf Blitzer on CNN so we don’t have to, notes here –

 

I just watched Bill Bennett quivering with outrage that Media Matters has “smeared” Rush Limbaugh; according to him Rush didn’t actually say that soldiers who spoke out against the war were “phony soldiers.” Wolf, uninformed about the details as usual, looked taken aback and somewhat frightened by Bennett’s wild-eyed defense, and left it up to Donna Brazile to present the facts. (She did quite well although she would have been better if armed with the details on this one.) What was interesting is that Bennett then more or less issued a veiled threat that they’d better be careful not to push this thing too far or the “betrayus” thing would haunt the Democrats forever. He was more animated than I’ve seen him in years.

 

The Republicans are going into full defense on Rush, which is what any smart organization does when its valuable assets are threatened. But Rush not only said what he said, he since edited his transcripts and lied repeatedly on the air. (You know what they say about it’s not the crime it’s the cover up…) His supporters will defend him against anything (and often have) but this one is documented - he got caught.

 

Well, yes he did, and there is fallout –

 

General Wesley Clark (who Limbaugh has repeatedly slandered) has started a drive to force congress to remove Limbaugh from Armed Forces Radio, a move I’ve been in favor of for years. I urge you to sign up for this one. Limbaugh is a cancer on the body politic and we have to stop being afraid of him - or being above these “petty squabbles.” One of the main sources of Republican power is their ability to gin up controversies like this latest MoveOn thing and it behooves us to go after them with the same amount of fervor when the opportunity presents itself. They will keep doing it until the price becomes too high.

 

Wrong.  The price never becomes too high for martyrs.  As it is in Baghdad, so it is here.  But you can sign Clark’s petition if you’d like.  It won’t do much good.

 

Digby offers this assessment –

 

Bennett said today that the Democrats had erred because if they were going to try to kill the king, they’d better succeed, and Rush is the king of talk radio. He’s right. And the Democrats should have been working to take him down long ago. It’s my belief that the conservative movement of the past decade or so was a three headed hydra: Newt, Delay and Rush. Sure, there are others, including Bush’s brain, and Grover Norquist (whom I have sometimes included as the fourth head of the hydra) but those three stood for different things that were hugely important to the success of the movement. Newt was the visionary. Delay was the congressional enforcer. And Rush was the voice, screaming out violent hatred for liberals and Democrats day after day, decade after decade. It took its toll, to the point where we can hardly even stand ourselves.

 

Newtie’s now irrelevant. Delay is gone. Only Rush remains and he is probably the biggest prize. On a purely practical, hardball political basis, the Democrats should have been working to take him out for years. Now is their chance to turn the Republicans’ patented hissy kabuki back on them and hoist an avowed political enemy with his own poisonous petard at the same time. There are many others who will happily take his place, no doubt about it. But his voice is uniquely associated with the radical wingnuts, and it is an important symbolic message to the country if they can finally make an example of him.

 

This isn’t going to be easy, although she says it’s more than just a political knife fight.  It’s the principle –

 

After all, the man was fired from ESPN for his racist statements. He talks about any women who don’t worship him like they are either whores or doormats. He has been spewing dangerous eliminationist bile about liberals in general for years and he tells our troops in Iraq every single day on Armed Forces Radio, paid for by you and me, that the Democrats are unpatriotic traitors, which really is reprehensible.

 

There are a lot of public affairs programs. And yet they pipe this hateful, radical gasbag into the war zone while sanctimoniously exhorting everyone else to support the troops. Troops who, according to Rush, can’t disagree with him without being “phony soldiers.” It is an insult to large numbers of Americans, including many in the military, who aren’t Republicans, that they are forced to pay for Rush Limbaugh to spew his disgusting partisan rhetoric into Iraq and Afghanistan - and then lie to the troops when it comes back to haunt him. It’s just wrong and if the Democratic congress can’t do even one other thing, the least they could do is put an end to this.

 

That seems unlikely.  You need to get something through your head.  The Army, West Point and all, the Navy and Marines, the Air Force, the Coast Guard – the Pentagon and everything – these are all part of the Republican Party.  What the hell else do you think Rush Limbaugh has been saying?  That’s his whole point.  Why else would he be talking about “phony soldiers” and all?  It’s time to purge the ranks, before the coup or something.  It is kind of obvious.

 

That’s why this is quaint, a congressional candidate and career Naval officer, Eric Massa, calling Limbaugh out –

 

You’re a pompous coward and it’s about time someone called you out on it and that someone is me… My name is Eric Massa and you know where to find me.

 

Yeah, just like Michael Douglas in The American President – 1995, directed by that lefty Rob Reiner, from a script by Aaron Sorkin, the guy with the cocaine problem who gave us the West Wing show too –

 

We’ve got serious problems, and we need serious people, and if you want to talk about character, Bob, you’d better come at me with more than a burning flag and a membership card. If you want to talk about character and American values, fine. Just tell me where and when, and I’ll show up. This is a time for serious people, Bob, and your fifteen minutes are up. My name is Andrew Shepherd, and I am the President.

 

Cue the heroic music.

 

On the other hand, on Tuesday, October 2, there was the new VoteVets ad – an injured combat veteran calling Rush to task.  Rush had that one covered – he man was so brain damaged he didn’t know what he was saying –

 

“This is such a blatant use of a valiant combat veteran, lying to him about what I said and then strapping those lies to his belt, sending him out via the media and a TV ad to walk into as many people as he can walk into. This man will always be a hero to this country with everyone. Whoever pumped him full of these lies about what I said and embarrassed him with this ad has betrayed him, they aren’t hurting me they are betraying this soldier,” Limbaugh said.

 

See the guy’s response to that –

 

So, Rush Limbaugh called me a “suicide bomber.” More slander from the high and mighty sitting in his chair nursing the boils on his ass. I can assure you that I am no suicide bomber and that I can think for myself.

 

Rush, your phony soldier comments pissed me off. The audacity of someone like you who never had the courage to stand and fight for what you believe in makes my head spin. That is what made me stand up and state my convictions in front of a camera. I wanted to point out that you are wrong. I am not a phony soldier. I believe that we are not doing the right thing for national security by staying in Iraq. We are putting too much strain on our military by extending tours and not giving people enough time at home to rest. We have taken our eye off of the real Al-Qaeda and let them regroup to their pre-9/11 strength. We have not developed a political system in Iraq that would enable the country to stand on its own.

 

I stood in the sand, snow, dirt, mud and dust of both Afghanistan and Iraq. I spent over a week on a side of a mountain in Afghanistan during Operation Anaconda. I received The Bronze Star medal for my actions during that battle. I crossed the border into Iraq with the first wave of the 101st Airborne. I sustained an open head injury on the streets of Mosul after a vehicle-borne IED exploded next to the vehicle I was riding in. I have seen the aftermath of a real suicide bomber. I had loved ones who died in the 9/11 attacks. I have friends and colleagues who returned from the war in body bags.

 

How dare you call someone like me a phony soldier and a suicide bomber? In the commercial I just taped, I told you unless you had the guts to say something to my face, stop telling lies about my service. Well you haven’t had the guts to say it to my face, but I am waiting and the offer is still on the table.

 

Things seem to be heating up a bit.  Elegant political discourse is not possible.  So watch out for the Fox New police – and the last two guys quoted here should lay low.

 

How did it come to this?