Friday, December 02, 2005
Limits of Dissent, The Ugly Sequel
To be fair, there are several folks in my party I'd like to see dunked in the Potomac. Sadly, dimwittery seems rampant on Capitol Hill. But the unseemly fracas in the House over John Murtha's recent proposal, and the even shabbier and more dishonest coverage of same in the press, make me question the value of debate and dissent in a society where many actors seem determined to distort the facts and others are misinformed or even downright stupid.
That sounds harsh, but I shall attempt to back up my thesis. Debate is one thing, but how can voters make informed decisions when even the questions are framed dishonestly?
During House debate over the Murtha bill, Jean Schmidt passed on a comment from one of her constituents, who turns out to be a Reserve Marine Colonel (also, inconveniently for her, an Ohio state GOP legislator, which allowed the press to have a field day). Well, he did not stop being a citizen, nor a Marine, simply because he is a Republican. Colonel Bubp called Ms. Schmidt a few moments before she ventured onto the House floor and expressed his vocal disapproval of the Murtha bill. He told her to pass on a message to "that congressman" that "cowards cut and run, Marines never do". Ms. Schmidt described the phone call thusly:
"I wrote down what he was saying," she said in the interview. "He did ask me to send a message to Congress, and he also said send a message to 'that congressman.' He did not know that congressman's name, but I did.
A few minutes later, her written notes ('send that congressman a message: cowards cut and run: Marines never do') became this statement:
He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message: that cowards cut and run, Marines never do."
You will note that the two accounts are virtually identical save the substitution of Murtha's name for "that congressman". House Democrats could barely control their histrionics. Now to anyone who has lived with or known Marines, this sentiment is hardly a shocker. Two hundred years of proud Marine Corps history make it pretty much common knowledge that Marines would rather die than run from a fight. But you'd think Colonel Bubp had publicly advocated kitten bouncing from the reaction his words received. Media coverage over the next week or so was an absolute travesty; to the extent that I often wondered if English had mysteriously become the lamestream media's second language. The Papir of Record were incoherent in their indignation:
They House came to a standstill shouted Ms. Schmidt down, causing the House to come to a abrupt standstill, and moments later, Representative Harold Ford, Democrat of Tennessee, charged across the chamber’s center aisle to the Republican side screaming that the attack had been unwarranted.
Howard Kurtz started sounding like Kitty Kelley:
Look who's sorry today for calling Murtha a coward: It's Mean Jean Schmidt:
"While I strongly disagree with his policy, neither Representative Bubp nor I ever wished to attack Congressman Murtha," she said in a statement. ''I only take exception to his policy position." She's right about Danny Bubp, an Ohio state rep who says he never said what Schmidt said he said.
Wait, this is even better: She's blaming the media!
"Rep. Jean Schmidt says her comments Friday on the floor of the U.S. House have been misinterpreted and that she has been made a scapegoat by a media disappointed that Congress didn't vote to withdraw troops from Iraq," reports the Dayton Daily News .
Gee, I could have sworn I heard her use "cowards" and "Murtha" in the same sentence.
This was so silly I nearly spit out my coffee. If we're going to pick any two words in a sentence at random and simply ignore the rest, then life is going to get extremely complicated. In Mr. Kurtz's column that day, this sentence appeared:
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) injected himself...
I suppose now the Senator will be contacting Mr. Kurtz to demand a retraction of the implication that he has a substance abuse problem?
The other interesting distortion being trumpeted far and wide by the media is that Schmidt "misquoted Bubp". Actually, Bubp merely denied using Murtha's name or that he intended to imply he was a coward. Ironically, this is something both he and Schmidt have agreed upon from day one. It is the media and House Democrats who insist on enlarging an opinion on what Marines would think of the tactic of leaving Iraq early to a personal attack on the character of Rep. Murtha. Trust me, if a Marine wants to insult someone personally, he doesn't rely upon oblique insults that require the recipient to notice that two words have been juxtaposed in a sentence. That would be the Air Force.
For a while I was keeping track of the number of articles which said Schmidt called Murtha a coward (technically, if this were true it would be Bubp who had called him a coward, but nevermind...) without including the actual quote so readers could judge for themselves while conveniently including quotes from House Democrats saying Schmidt had called Murtha a coward. Why am I fixated on this?
Because it is a distraction (and it is intended to be a distraction) from the real issue of whether it is right for us to withdraw early from Iraq, and it is meant to inflame people and make them angry rather than to encourage rational discussion of an important issue.
A while ago, TigerHawk posted an excellent piece on the limits of dissent in a free society. I responded briefly here, but I have always wanted more time to think about the issue:
TH later suggests that dissent which "efficiently balances our systemic interest in robust public debate with the collateral damage it inflicts is "legitimate,", while dissent which effectively does more harm than good (while not seeking to further public debate) is not. I am somewhat more comfortable with this second view of dissent than I am with looking at the dissenter's motivation, which is all too easily debatable. And if this second test is used the question arises, how does one judge whether dissent furthers our interest in robust public debate?
After all, these days almost anything is open to debate. The most trivial matters are endlessly argued in the public forum. I think a more rational and objective standard is needed.
After being somewhat lightheartedly accused of favoring "authority over the questioners" over at Right Reason, I find myself still disturbed over the limits of dissent in a free society. The dangers of suppressing dissent are obvious; yet at least to me, so are the dangers of allowing completely unlimited and uninformed dissent to drive our national policy, as this piece demonstrates:
In recent months a civil-military divide has emerged in the United States over the war in Iraq. Unlike much of the Iraq debate between Democrats and Republicans, it is over the present and the future rather than the past. Increasingly, civilians worry that the war is being lost, or at least not won. But the military appears as confident as ever of ultimate victory. This difference of opinion does not amount to a crisis in national resolve, and it will not radically affect our Iraq policy in the short term. But it is insidious and dangerous nonetheless. To the extent possible, the gap should be closed.
I am admittedly biased, but I disagree with the author regarding there being a crisis in the national will. I think we have seen the first cracks in the wall, and now that they are there the media and the anti-war opposition will continue to chip away at them.
The results of this Pew poll (via Heigh Ho) show a disturbing divide between the "intelligensia" and the military (the so-called 'boots on the ground' and not coincidentally the folks closest to the action) on our prospects for success in Iraq. Notice the media figures: only 33% think we will succeed - half the number of military surveyed. Notably the sample sizes weren't terribly large in this poll, but the results aren't very surprising either.And Ed Morrissey gets to the root of eroding public support for the war right here:
When journalists embedded themselves in American units during the initial invasion in March - May 2003, the reports gave a much more balanced look at the military efforts in Iraq. However, the national media derided the efforts of "embeds" as out of context and government-controlled propaganda. Now the reporters choose to write their reports from the Green Zone in Baghdad, far away from the actual fighting going on and reporting instead on nothing more than the number of IEDs and body counts. Only a handful of embeds still exist, and they do not get the kind of national exposure that the 2003 invasion embeds received.
Until the media starts reporting honestly from Iraq, the divergence will continue to grow as civilians continue to operate from ignorance, while the military operates from a position not only of intelligence but from experience. The real danger presented will be the self-fulfillment of the Starship Troopers (movie, not book) paradigm, where the only people qualified to control the military are the military themselves -- and the press will have created that atmosphere based on their short-sighted adherence to their anti-military and anti-Bush biases.
But it's not just the media. I see this same divergence of opinion in Congress, as Congressmen and women who have actually been to Iraq and Afghanistan are uniformly more positive about our prospects than those who sit on the sidelines and carp. Yet the negative ones are the ones getting all the press.
Consequently, much of "our national debate" over the war, both inside and outside the blogosphere, is a profoundly dishonest and ill-informed one. As a military wife who hears a lot of inside information (both positive and negative) that I cannot pass on, I am extremely frustrated by it all. A perfect example is the "a lot of these people are on their 3rd tour" meme. Well of course they're on their third tour - the Marine Corps only sends our people on 7-month floats - then we rotate them back home for six months. If we sent them for longer periods, they wouldn't BE on their third tours now would they? The fact that we are trying not to ride our people hard and put them away wet is being used against us by people like John Murtha and John Kerry, and it rankles no end. And Murtha is a former Marine. He knows better.
Debate is fine, but when it is dishonest it cheapens everything it touches. And in this case, lives are at stake. Both the press and certain members of Congress are intentionally mischaracterizing events both past and present in an attempt to sway public opinion. There is nothing wrong with trying to persuade, but such attempts should be made honestly. And as I pointed out in my response to TigerHawk's post on limited dissent, that is the danger in allowing unlimited debate. Often the participants are self-interested and dishonest, yet uninformed people believe them and decisions are made which affect lives for generations to come. But in a free society where the government is prohibited from using the press to get its message out, the megaphone is inherently biased. The President has a great deal of trouble getting even an hour of prime time airspace to address the nation. When he does speak, his words are truncated and distorted by the media before they reach the public, and so the national debate is again poisoned. I cannot believe this is healthy for our country's future.
The question is, what do we do about it in a situation where a nation has made commmitments that cannot honorably be shirked, both to its own volunteer forces and to other nations? Do we allow endless questioning and course corrections, to the point where other nations come to believe that the United States blows in the wind of the latest opinion poll? I truly believe that would be disastrous for the future of this country - it implies to terrorist organizations like al Qaeda that all they need do is scare enough of us and we will collapse like a paper tiger. Do we truly want the Executive Branch to be nothing more than a rubber stamp for Gallup Polls, as many Democrats have suggested?
I hope not.
5 Comments:
By 
TigerHawk, at
Fri Dec 02, 01:50:00 PM:
What a great post -- especially the bit around Murtha.
The Democrats would not be so sensitive to any suggestion that they are cowards if they weren't so worried that that is what they are perceived to be. What they don't realize is that it is not honest debate about war that makes them appear to be weak. It is the weepy terms of engagement that they use in that debate. American casualties, for example, are a favorite reason to withdraw, even though they are, if I may boldly say so, trivial by the standards of history. Yes people are dying, but if 1000 dead and 5000 wounded a year is the reason to leave then, well, it is a cowardly one. Now, honesty requires that I admit that many Democrats make much deeper arguments than simply bleating about casualties, but there is so much emphasis placed on casualties by the anti-war wing (see Arlington West and the "chickenhawk" argument, for example) that Democrats have reason to be worried about the charge sticking.
On the matter of dissent in wartime, I think you and I disagree, a bit, on the remedy. You do not come out and talk about legal restrictions on speech, but you use the term "allow," which at least hints in that direction. My own view is that we cannot limit speech, at least during limited war (a war for national survival is perhaps a different matter, but then there is little dissent). We can, however, denounce it as illegitimate, which is my preferred method. We must never shirk from pointing out that anti-war dissent has costs because it furthers the enemy's victory conditions, and that therefore it is unprincipled and unpatriotic to dissent during limited war for the purpose of advancing other objectives entirely (such as electoral success in 2006).
By Cassandra, at
Fri Dec 02, 02:28:00 PM:
No, I think there you misunderstand me. Actually I don't think there is any real way you can "disallow" dissent, TH. I should have said vigorously oppose, perhaps. I'm awfully tired - I had so many mistakes in this post, and that always happens when I'm exhausted. It's not as well thought-out as I would have liked.
My use of "allow" is in a more narrow sense, as in perhaps the halls of Congress. For instance, when I was running (or even participating in) a board of a charity organization, at some point we had taken a formal decision to embark on a course of action, yet certain members (whom I might add had not volunteered to help out) constantly carped and criticized and questioned every stinking step the board took, just to make trouble.
Now at some point, I became aggravated as President and simply said, "Look - we have decided on this, and if you feel differently you may squawk all you wish, but do so *outside* the meeting. You are wasting my time and you are not on the agenda." In all fairness, I put up with an awful lot of this crap before taking this extreme step, but it had gotten so bad that people were fighting and it was destroying friendships and poisoning the atmosphere.
I don't know what the right answer is. I don't think the Republican party has been forceful enough in rebutting its critics. The White House is busy and shouldn't have to do this quite frankly, and I can't understand for the life of me what the heck Cheney is doing. That's his job, but he's rather a lightning rod himself.
I've often thought that though she's a brilliant choice in State, Bush would have done better to move Condi into a White House chief of staff role where she could have taken charge of the political infighting for him. She'd have taken out the opposition in no time, and in my more cynical moments I think the State Deptartment is ineffectual at best. I'm not sure that wouldn't have been a better use of her talents.
I'm not even sure Bush doesn't need to go to Congress himself and say, "Look you spineless twits, the nation has made commitments and you all need to honor them so we don't look like a bunch of idiots. Now stop behaving like children." I am profoundly alarmed by our present course, but I have never advocated coercion - only moral suasion.
I can't imagine why people keep thinking I want to see jackboots all over DC - is it because I'm married to a Marine? That's why he's in the military - so we don't have to live with that sort of thing. We have a Bill of Rights for a reason - I don't want to see it eviscerated.
The solution is more likely removing some restrictions on government access to media. What in God's name is wrong with allowing the President to address the nation? That's not propaganda and I'm tired of the media casting it that way. Why can't we have a government channel where the White House and military get a chance to broadcast *their* side instead of al Jazeera's? Let people tune in (or not) at THEIR option, like PBS. I for one would appreciate the option to hear both sides FOR ONCE and make up my own mind.
That's the kind of solution I'd like to see in response to this problem, not shutting the opposition up, but allowing the other side a chance to speak without the media filter for once.
By Jim - PRS, at
Fri Dec 02, 04:42:00 PM:
Kudos! That was a terrific post.
Jim
Parkway Rest Stop
http://parkwayreststop.com
By Cassandra, at
Fri Dec 02, 05:16:00 PM:
Thank you Jim. I get carried away sometimes.
By Gordon Smith, at
Sat Dec 03, 12:05:00 AM:
Here's my response to Hawk's original post. I reckon it remains germane...
Hawk! You old dog! That's a great frackin' post. I'm glad to see you're getting a rich conversation out of it.
From your list of reasons for dissent, here is the one I subscribe to:
"To deter this or any future administration from launching a war under similar circumstances in the future."
The circumstances:
-Some thought Saddam was armed to the teeth
-Some didn't
-Saddam was under wraps and no military intervention was necessary
-The Bush administration gave the American people only the most alarming 'evidence', which of course proved to be 100% incorrect / false / untrue.
"We have satellite photos that indicate that banned materials have recently been moved from a number of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities. There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more."-Powell before the world at the United Nations
-the Bush administration did not ever discuss with the American people or with the Congress the multiple intelligence reports questioning an Iraq / Al Qaeda nexus, questioning Iraq's WMD.
-With millions of people in the street worldwide protesting Bush's new fangled "pre-emptive" war idea, the administration chose to alienate rather that build coalition. The "coalition troops" in Iraq are only a group effort if you think that you were really helping Daddy drive the car when you were sitting in his lap.
-Bush administration officials were planning the invasion, consulting the oil industry, before 9/11. They were going to invade Iraq, and 9/11 provided them with cover.
-PNAC, many of whose members are current neocon Bush hawks, "In 1998, following marked Iraqi unwillingness to co-operate with UN weapons inspections, members of the PNAC including Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz wrote to the president, Bill Clinton, urging him to remove Saddam Hussein from power using US diplomatic, political and military power. The letter argued that Saddam would pose a threat to the U.S., its Middle-East allies and oil resources in the region if he succeeded in obtaining Weapons of Mass Destruction."
So it's clear that Bush and high officials in the Bush administration felt the invasion of Iraq was necessary in 1998, when they asserted that he didn't have WMD but would be big trouble if he ever did.
The Bush administration wanted this war. Anyone who comes into office wanting a war and then uses 9/11 as political cover for a covert agenda as they try to scare the pants off of a nervous nation deserves intense scrutiny and public ass whoopin'.
We aren't just offering aid and comfort to the enemy by funnelling mismanaged troops into a war that never should have been started, we are creating the enemy as we go along. The administration's defense of torture, use of White Phosphorous, collateral killings of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 civilians in Iraq, and inability to secure the situation with the number of troops we have on the ground - these things encourage the enemy more than a few doughy libs.
The Bush administration has created a most excellent enemy in Iraq, and now we're bogged down there with no easy way out. We can "fight them to the last man" only if they're not meeting their recruiting goals, and images from Falluja don't make that likely. We can "stand down when the Iraqis stand up", but, even when I try to get into Pollyanna Bush Supporter's shoes, this route may take decades and a trillion U.S. Dollars while our social programs at home are being eviscerated.
Bush made a willful mistake and refuses to accept that what he did was wrong. Whatever.
But we must never let this sort of shortsighted, violent, hamhanded, arrogant foreign policy take root again.
