Costs of War: Ugly Politics
By Shaun Waterman for ISN
In the aftermath of any terrorist attack, politicians who use their platform to do anything other than condemn it - who, for instance, use it to make a political point about the validity of the terrorists’ target or comment on their motivation - open themselves in the post-9/11 environment to the charge that they are appeasers, if not actual apologists.
The external pageFBI told The Hill newspaper it is not treating the small plane suicide attack on the federal Internal Revenue Service building in Austin, Texas last month as an act of terrorism.
Perhaps that is why some Republican lawmakers apparently do not feel obliged to condemn the actions of Joseph Stack, who killed himself and an IRS employee, and injured 13 others, when he flew his single engine Piper Cherokee into the building, after burning down his home and leaving an angry note denouncing the agency.
Asked about the attack by Fox News, newly minted Republican Massachusetts Senator, and party rock star du jour Scott external pageBrown called it “tragic,” adding “I feel for the families, obviously, that are being affected.” Later he agreed that the act was “extreme.”
But he added that, “I don't know if it's related, but I can just sense, not only in my election but since being here in Washington, people are frustrated. They want transparency. They want their elected officials to be accountable and open … I'm not sure if there's a connection,” he concluded. I certainly hope not. But, you know, we need to do things better” in Washington.
Although he does not condone the attack, Brown lends it legitimacy by linking the motivations of the attacker to the legitimate political aspirations of American voters - and the angry populism that helped sweep him to power and risks turning this year’s Congressional elections into a blood-letting for the Democratic majority.
Republican Congressman and Iowa anti-tax radical Steve King went one step further - endorsing the implied objective of the attack by advocating the elimination of the agency it was aimed at.
“I think if we’d abolished the IRS back when I first advocated it, he wouldn’t have a target for his airplane,” external pagehe told progressive bloggers ThinkProgress. He called “the incident” in Texas “sad … but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary and when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the IRS, it’s going to be a happy day for America.”
There is no evidence that Stack was anything more than an embittered and possibly unbalanced loner - and external pagea report that a federal hazmat team had been called to an IRS mail processing facility in Utah on Monday turned out to be a external pagefalse alarm. But the response to his attack from Republicans makes clear how high the rhetorical stakes have become as they struggle to block a health care bill they have now made clear they are opposed to on principle.
Fueling populist anger
President Barack Obama himself, often a more dispassionate analyst of the political scene than one might expect, external pagepointed out that - to some extent - Republicans’ own success in fuelling that populist anger had trapped them.
“If the way these [health care reform] issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives, what happens is you guys then don't have a lot of room to negotiate with me,” he told Republican lawmakers at their retreat in January.
“Many of you,” he continued, would be “politically vulnerable in your own base,” if they voted with the administration on anything. ”You've given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because what you've been telling your constituents is this guy is doing all kinds of crazy stuff that's going to destroy America.”
“In my experience and reading of history, it’s hard to recall a time [in modern history] when there was so much questioning - within the mainstream - of the legitimacy of the government, especially the presidency,” lawyer Steven Cash, formerly Democratic chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, told ISN Security Watch.
Only now, a focus on legitimacy
Cash said that there had been an unprecedented focus on the personal legitimacy of President Obama. Even in the heat of the battles over impeachment with president Bill Clinton and criticism of president George W Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, he said, “people complained about what he did as president, but people didn’t question that he lawfully held the office.”
By contrast, during the Obama administration, “The mainstream media has given airtime to examining the claims [of the so-called Birther movement that] he is not really president.” Cable news outlets “report the views of people who claim [President Obama] is secretly in league with our terrorist enemies,” said Cash, now in private practice.
“The level of political discourse keeps falling” all over, he added. Cash blamed in part, “Changes in the media,” which have “put a premium on the most extreme views.”
“Things are being said that in an earlier era would have been outside rational political discourse,” he concluded, adding that it was ironic that protest was focusing on the use of reconciliation to force a vote in the Senate.
“It’s hard to see how insisting on a majority vote is dictatorship.”