Opinions
Take Two
Conservatives are rehashing liberal arguments—badly.
Talk show host Rush Limbaugh puffs on his Ashton VSG cigar. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)If you’re the sort of person who gets news from Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, the swine flu is alarming. And not just alarming for the predictable, health-related reasons; no, both pundits recently argued, it’s worse than that—the disease represents a horrific opportunity for President Obama to use a fabricated threat to push his radical agenda.
Last week, Limbaugh explained: “It’s designed to get people to respond to government orders.” He goes on to say that “the media, of course, just falls right in line here with amplifying the nature of the crisis.” And Beck had a theory of his own: Obama declared a public health emergency to hasten the process of getting Kathleen Sebelius confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services. (The Senate voted to confirm her on April 28 by a bipartisan vote of 65-31).
At first glance, these seem like standard-issue anti-Obama conspiracy theories. Since long before he was elected, conservative pundits have thrown the usual slanders against progressives at Obama: “He wants to take over our schools! He wants to involve government in every aspect of our lives!” In a time of fear and uncertainty, these tired old tropes can take on reinvigorated potency.
But the reaction to the the threat of the virus known as H1N1 shows something at work: a strange tinge of nostalgia that comes with hearing pundits complain that the president is hyping an external threat to the well-being of U.S. citizens to advance his political agenda. This, after all, is exactly what many liberals said about President Bush’s invocations of fears of terrorism from September 11, 2001 right up until the end of his time in office, so it’s telling that conservative pundits like Beck and Limbaugh are relying on this narrative. Unfortunately for them, it makes a lot less sense this time around.
It’s beyond dispute at this point that, at the very least, the Bush administration incompetently handled raising terrorist threat levels. Once in 2004, information that turned out to be several years old was presented to the public as a dire, possibly imminent threat. Former head of the Homeland Security Department, Tom Ridge, said in 2005 that there were times the administration would insist on raising the terror level based on rather vaporlike evidence. Last year Keith Olbermann presented a detailed timeline of the many instances in which the Bush administration appeared to heighten fears of terrorism for political reasons, concluding, “what we were told about terror, and not told, for security reasons, has overlapped considerably with what we were told about terror, and not told, for political reasons.”
The Bush administration’s motives behind all this are clear. Their lives were easier when the nation was scared of terrorism. Countless policies, from the war in Iraq to the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, were presented through the prism of national security. The more scared people are, the more likely they are to support policies they might think twice about otherwise.
Conservatives are seeking to repackage this narrative against Obama, but the swine flu version simply doesn’t make sense. It’s certainly true that there’s been no shortage of hysteria, as any photo of a surgical-mask-wearing residents of Mexico City will tell you. If Obama really were exaggerating the threat of swine flu, then he must be more powerful than we thought since he somehow got the World Health Organization and the European Union on board as well.
Conservative pundits are still getting used to the idea of going toe-to-toe with the president every day, and there are bound to be some early bugs and embarrassments. Since Sept. 11, 2001, conservatives have done a good job of controlling the nation’s discourse so it’s a bit odd that they’ve resorted to stealing liberal arguments.
Jesse Singal is an associate editor at Campus Progress.
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