Take Two
Conservatives are rehashing liberal arguments—badly.
By Jesse Singal
May 6, 2009
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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If one has any virology training one wonders why so much is made of H1N1 in media but so little serology is done where the confirmed cases live in neighborhoods in Mexico City. How transmissible is the flu is seen from how prevalent are antibodies to it a month after it appears, giving you a good ratio of its transitability and virulence. But that was not done. Instead all the epidemiologic methods of the 19th Century— the social ones— were applied. Could it have been a test for population control? We don’t know because so much incompetence could explain so much of what happened along the Federal bureaucracy that seeming “motive” may just assume too much brains in the operation— like the flight of Air Force One buzzing sky scrappers in NYC. There are so many jerks in the 21st Century Administrations with so many ways of speaking for the president that one wonders if there really is anyone we can hold accountable after something is done but the one guy at whose desk the buck stops. I too put my efforts and my prayers to work for Obama. But the cacoon of Wall Street idiot- savants he encased himself in makes me wonder what kind of a butterfly will morph from it when the banks open it up. Obama has got military in civilian positions that may be enjoying bullying annonymity over civilians and, with the neophite president that allows them to shove all sorts of crap down his throat, and label it “your policy, sir.” I am reminded of the “Brezhnev Doctrine.” According to high level Presidium members, it was dreamed up by a bunch from Pravda editors who served as Brezhnev’s speechwriters. they decided to put it into his speech. When he asked: what the hell is Brezhnev Doctrine after the speech, the aides responded: IT IS WHAT YOU JUST EXPLAINED TO THE PUBLIC, COMRADE. We had a lot of Bush policies by speechwriter— controlled from Cheney’s office. Now, too late, we learn that the pacemakers in Cheney’s and the neocons’ chests were much too slow for guys who pretended to think so fast on such complicated issues. Well, somehow, Bush’s war is now OBAMA’S WAR. Why? Obama has no idea about the SHANGHAI ACCORD which has as unofficial members China, Russia, India, Iran and all Central Asian States. While they all want to cut eachother’s big left toe off, they do want to protect eachother’s right toe for common purpose. This kind of sophisticated dialectic diplomacy is waaaaaay beyond our microcephalic star-whore generals’ capacity to keep up with. And yet, they exclusively look at the screen of the unmanned killer drones’ cameras of Pakistan/Afghanistan and ask “the White House” for permission to fire, based, you got it, on their account of why. Obama, frankly is up to his ears in trying to keep up with the Wall Street Mafia in his Cabinet and the cleptos in Congress.
Sure, Conservatives, now out of power, are borrowing the lines of the Dems when out of power because the reasons to bitch are the same: the BUREAUCRACY does its thing and the President is either in front of the mirror oblivious to it all, in his skivies looking at himself wearing the Presidential bomber jacket wispering, “I’m the decider” or like Obama, is trying to find out who made the decison for him and why. Obama is given a “yes sir” on strategy or policy but the men at the wheels of implimentation are bureaucrats with agendas of their their own for post-Obama. None have been close to the President long enough for him to second guess them. So now the Republicans are screaming at Obama because they realize that the bureaucracy has gone off on its own, this time more in mutiny than in idiocy as in the case of Bush. Everybody thinks of his future post-Obama or his place in history. All of them want to say when they old and have to creep to the podium to reminess: actually, President Obama was too busy on his blackberry trying to get someone to bring him paper because the presidential toilet ran out, so I—ME— had to make the decison at the hinge of history. The only way Obama can really rule is if WE THE VOTERS stay with our eyes glued on the bureaucracy because the media is selectively blind. So we have to see what’s going on instead of with our ears glued to the phone in case some opinion polster calls for our opinions. WE MUST HELP OBAMA— Bush was beyond help because he feared, to the point of panic, decision-making. He only did it when he had a scape goat on hand for use when the consequences befall him. Obama takes the blame but he’s constantly faced with a fait accompli before he ever gets asked what he commands be done. So whether the president is an idiot a la Bush or a brillianr systematic hands on Boss like Obama, the bureaucracy does its thing, the same, no matter who is boss and how smart he is. The Republicans know it as well as the Dems knew it. But so as not to confuse dumb Mr and Mrs America, everyone pretends that the President made such and such a decison when in reality THE BUREAUCRACY, or some one in it, DID. Dems like to blame the guy they’ll run against in the next presidential election and Republicans too. So they personalize their gripe as if to say that the incumbent is a dictator. But in fact, he is a victim, eaten up by the unruly bureaucracy of power seekers. Everything you sited is really bureaucrap, not Presidential action. Obama is a new breed, but he is one man holding back a bureaucratic tsunami of fait accomplis with a spoon. If you all help him, things will change; if you don’t, he’ll get overwhelmed because multitasking by one man can’t beat single tasking by a cast of thousands.
— DE Teodoru - May 8, 12:15 AM - #right on De Teodoru.. the govt machine that consists mainly of government unions will bite off more than the Democrats would like.. this most surely helps put money in the Dems pockets come election time but, runs out of control when the ‘decider’ is in it’s own corner.
— Chris - May 12, 12:27 AM - #