Un-American? It's Even Un-Republican!

The GOP has decided to play the treason card. Desparate to silence the searing criticism being leveled by Kerry and Edwards castigating their disasterous pursuit of NeoCon goals in Iraq, BushCo now seeks to equate this dissent with disloyalty. As Dana Milbank puts it in today's WaPo, this tactic "Tests the Limits" of legitimate campaigning.

President Bush and leading Republicans are increasingly charging that Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry and others in his party are giving comfort to terrorists and undermining the war in Iraq -- a line of attack that tests the conventional bounds of political rhetoric.

Appearing in the Rose Garden yesterday with Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, Bush said Kerry's statements about Iraq "can embolden an enemy." After Kerry criticized Allawi's speech to Congress, Vice President Cheney tore into the Democratic nominee, calling him "destructive" to the effort in Iraq and the struggle against terrorism.

Milbank notes that the treason accusations now being made by BushCo

have been a component of American politics since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and surfaced in the modern era during the McCarthy communist hunt and the Vietnam War protests.

And, finally, the NYT has decided to weigh in with an editorial up today slamming BushCo for this tactic:

President Bush and his surrogates are taking their re-election campaign into dangerous territory. Mr. Bush is running as the man best equipped to keep America safe from terrorists - that was to be expected. We did not, however, anticipate that those on the Bush team would dare to argue that a vote for John Kerry would be a vote for Al Qaeda. Yet that is the message they are delivering - with a repetition that makes it clear this is an organized effort to paint the Democratic candidate as a friend to terrorists.

When Vice President Dick Cheney declared that electing Mr. Kerry would create a danger "that we'll get hit again," his supporters attributed that appalling language to a rhetorical slip. But Mr. Cheney is still delivering that message. Meanwhile, as Dana Milbank detailed so chillingly in The Washington Post yesterday, the House speaker, Dennis Hastert, said recently on television that Al Qaeda would do better under a Kerry presidency, and Senator Orrin Hatch, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has announced that the terrorists are going to do everything they can between now and November "to try and elect Kerry."

This is despicable politics. It's not just polarizing - it also undermines the efforts of the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency to combat terrorists in America. Every time a member of the Bush administration suggests that Islamic extremists want to stage an attack before the election to sway the results in November, it causes patriotic Americans who do not intend to vote for the president to wonder whether the entire antiterrorism effort has been kidnapped and turned into part of the Bush re-election campaign. The people running the government clearly regard keeping Mr. Bush in office as more important than maintaining a united front on the most important threat to the nation.

Indeed, suppression of dissent by such means is Un-American. In fact it has been utilized by tyrants throughout history. Herman Goering , Nazi Luftwaffe Chief, put it candidly during the Nuremberg trials:

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.

In the past though, true American patriots have refused to let such rhetoric silence their dissent .

On Jan. 12, 1848, while the Mexican-American War raged on, a 38-year-old Illinois congressman introduced a measure that would censure former President James K. Polk. During a lengthy speech, that young member of the Illinois House of Representatives called into question Polk's justification for war with Mexico — a war which was, in the words of the speaker, "unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced."

The congressman said Polk would have "gone farther with his proof, if it had not been for the small matter, that the truth would not permit him" and noted that the war was "from beginning to end, the sheerest deception." The congressman exclaimed, "Let him answer fully, fairly and candidly. Let him answer with facts and not with arguments." More importantly, "Let him attempt no evasion, no equivocation."

The Congressman? Why, Abraham Lincoln, of course, the Republican whom our present Clueless Leader has idolized as the best president in U.S. history. Lincoln, in criticizing the war

realized that he had to distinguish between the role of the military and the policies of President Polk. The army had done its work admirably, Congressman Lincoln noted, but the president had "bungled" his. Polk, he feared, was "a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man. God grant he may be able to show there is not something about his conscience more painful than all his mental perplexity."

Lincolon was the first of many Republicans to embrace the vital democratic right of dissent, even during wartime. Teddy Roosevelt vigorously defended the right of dissent.

In 1918, ex-President Roosevelt challenged Woodrow Wilson's sweeping crackdown against dissent after the American entry into World War I. "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong," Roosevelt said, "is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."

Even after Pearl Harbor, when Americans rallied to the support of their country, Republican stalwart Senator Robert Taft emphasized:

Too many people desire to suppress criticism simply because they think it will give some comfort to the enemy...If that comfort makes the enemy feel better for a few moments, they are welcome to it...because the maintenance of the right to criticism in the long run will do the country maintaining it a great deal more good than it will do the enemy.

What would Lincoln, or Roosevelt, or Taft say to the present pretenders to the White House who are using tactics that are "morally treasonable to the American public"?

And what would BushCo say to those GOP forebearers who criticized their war Presidents? Would they dare call them treasonous?

We need to join with the NYT and shout out that for BushCo to sink to this level of rhetoric puts them in the company of history's worst tyrants and defiles the legacy of patriotic Americans of both parties who have fought and died for the right of free speech, even speech questioning the policies and judgment of a President at war.

Comments

[Omar Joe]

The following article by William Kristol in the Weekly Standard best sums up the fitness of John Kerry for President.

Kerry is unfit to be commander-in-chief, and just like the 1970s, is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Disgraceful
From the October 4, 2004 issue: The disgraceful behavior of John Kerry and his team is sufficient grounds for concern about his fitness to be president
by William Kristol
10/04/2004, Volume 010, Issue 04

"WE REALLY DON'T KNOW what a President John Kerry would do about Iraq. His flip-flops about the war, his inconsistencies, the ambiguity of his current position (win or withdraw?)--all of these mean we can only guess about a Kerry presidency. He would probably be inclined to get out of Iraq as soon as possible; it might be the case, however, that as president he would nonetheless find himself staying and fighting. Who knows?

What we do know is this: Kerry and his advisers have behaved disgracefully this past week. That behavior is sufficient grounds for concern about his fitness to be president.

On Tuesday, President Bush spoke to the United Nations General Assembly. Senator Kerry decided not to say anything supportive of the president as he made the American case to the "international community." Nor did he simply campaign that day on other issues. No. Less than an hour after President Bush finished speaking in New York, Kerry was criticizing his remarks in Jacksonville, Florida: "At the United Nations today, the president failed to level with the world's leaders. Moments after Kofi Annan, the secretary general, talked about the difficulties in Iraq, the president of the United States stood before a stony-faced body and barely talked about the realities at all of Iraq. . . . He does not have the credibility to lead the world."

So Kerry credits Kofi Annan--who a few days before had condemned the "illegal" American war in Iraq--as a more accurate source of information on the subject than the president of the United States. Kerry also seems to think it significant that the General Assembly sat "stony-faced" while the president spoke. Would the applause of delegates from China, Sudan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and, yes, France, have made the president's speech more praiseworthy in Kerry's eyes?

Then Kerry was asked about Kofi Annan's description of the war in Iraq as an "illegal" invasion. Kerry answered: "I don't know what the law, the legalities are that he's referring to. I don't know." So the U.S. government is accused of breaking international law, and Kerry chooses not to defend his country against the charge, or to label it ridiculous or offensive. He is agnostic.

Then Kerry continued: "Well, let me say this to all of you: That underscores what I am saying. If the leader of the United Nations is at odds with the legality, and we're not working at getting over that hurdle and bringing people to the table, as I said in my speech yesterday, it's imperative to be able to build international cooperation." It's our fault that the U.N. is doing almost nothing to help in Iraq. After all, according to Kerry, "Kofi Annan offered the help of the United Nations months ago. This president chose to go the other way."

Leave aside the rewriting of history going on here. The president of the United States had just appealed for help from the United Nations and its member states to ensure that elections go forward in Iraq. Kerry could have reinforced that appeal for help with his own, thereby making it a bipartisan request. He chose instead to give the U.N., France, Germany, and everyone else an excuse to do nothing over these next crucial five weeks, with voter registration scheduled to begin November 1. If other nations prefer not to help the United States, the Democratic presidential candidate has given them his blessing.

Two days later, Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi spoke to a joint meeting of Congress. Sen. Kerry could not be troubled to attend, as a gesture of solidarity and respect. Instead, Kerry said in Ohio that Allawi was here simply to put the "best face on the policy." So much for an impressive speech by perhaps America's single most important ally in the war on terror, the courageous and internationally recognized leader of a nation struggling to achieve democracy against terrorist opposition.

But Kerry's rudeness paled beside the comment of his senior adviser, Joe Lockhart, to the Los Angeles Times: "The last thing you want to be seen as is a puppet of the United States, and you can almost see the hand underneath the shirt today moving the lips."

Is Kerry proud that his senior adviser's derisive comment about the leader of free Iraq will now be quoted by terrorists and by enemies of the United States, in Iraq and throughout the Middle East? Is the concept of a loyalty to American interests that transcends partisan politics now beyond the imagination of the Kerry campaign?

John Kerry has decided to pursue a scorched-earth strategy in this campaign. He is prepared to insult allies, hearten enemies, and denigrate efforts to succeed in Iraq. His behavior is deeply irresponsible--and not even in his own best interest.

There is some chance, after all, that John Kerry will be president in four months. If so, what kind of situation will he have created for himself? France will smile on him, but provide no troops. Those allies that have provided troops, from Britain and Poland and Australia and Japan and elsewhere, will likely recall how Kerry sneered at them, calling them "the coerced and the bribed." The leader of the government in Iraq, upon whom the success of John Kerry's Iraq policy will depend, will have been weakened before his enemies and ours--and will also remember the insult. Is this really how Kerry wants to go down in history: Willing to say anything to try to get elected, no matter what the damage to the people of Iraq, to American interests, and even to himself?"